Esri UK announced a major refresh of its flagship teaching resources and support for teachers, Teach with GIS, to help them improve how they teach with GIS across major curriculum areas.
Consisting of lesson plans, teaching tools such as videos, interactive maps, mobile apps and dashboards, events and training, the updated website aims to be the ‘go to’ GIS destination for those teaching ages 7 to 18.
Esri’s GIS software is currently used by over 3,500 schools across the UK, helping students learn about geography and gain new geospatial skills.
“GIS has been on the National Curriculum for over a decade, making lessons more interactive and investigative, helping students to understand things more quickly but many teachers we talk to still struggle to use it for the maximum benefit,” explained Katie Hall, Schools Manager at Esri UK. “The latest version of Teach with GIS is designed to help fix this.”
New additions to the site include a video showing teachers how easy it is to begin using GIS in the classroom, a live streaming section for upcoming live lectures and the ability to book slots in Esri UK’s free training courses for teachers.
A monthly event series ‘15-Minute Forums’ has also been added, providing regular updates on how to enrich key curriculum areas with GIS, from tracking hurricanes, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions from space, to using real Met Office data to understand climate change.
“This is the first major refresh of Teach with GIS since it was first launched two years ago, designed to support teachers so they can integrate GIS into different lesson plans more easily and enrich their teaching,” continued Hall. “The introduction of live lectures and a new training booking system will make it even easier for teachers to use GIS and bring geography alive for students.”
“Any teacher hoping to start or develop their use of GIS will find plenty of excellent expert advice and ready-made resources on the refreshed ‘Teach with GIS’ website. One of the many great aspects of ArcGIS Online is its capacity to visualise change over time, so that we can ‘see geography happen’ – showing coastal erosion, for example,” commented Brendan Conway, geography teacher at Notre Dame Senior School. “Career opportunities using geospatial knowledge and skills are increasing rapidly. The new website acknowledges this very effectively, with a range of judiciously placed profiles of people who use GIS in their work, demonstrating real world applications of geographical learning.”
Teachers can also sign-up to Esri UK’s free Education programme on the site, which provides free access to its ArcGIS software, teaching resources and training for all UK schools.
Resource highlights include:
- A live hurricane tracker app which allows students to track hurricanes in real time and see their predicted impacts on people, using data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC)
- 40 years of historic satellite imagery allowing students to go back in time and see the explosive growth of megacities, the impacts of deforestation on Earth’s rainforests, and important changes to their local area
- An interactive digital atlas, allowing teachers to switch between 2D maps and 3D models of landforms, to explore geographic processes and landscape histories, with the option to take 3D maps into virtual reality headsets with just a few clicks.
