Building Lesson Plans (Working with Ramapo College)

The GIS4Kids program was started with volunteers from New Jersey and a number of other states throughout the country to promote the use of GIS in K-12 education. Despite enthusiastic efforts by our GIS4Kids volunteers to make GIS a continuous part of the core curriculum in schools, GIS projects often end up being one-time semester projects. The short-lived role of GIS in K-12 education was determined to be the result of limited funding for the GIS projects.  While it is important to develop successful case projects utilizing GIS, our ultimate goals is to have GIS incorporated into the annual curricula for K-12 students. 

Ridge High School in Bernards Township, NJ has utilized a customized Google Maps API for its environmental science course. The API was used to create a project in which students used GIS technology to track annual deer population in the area.  The project has now become part of the core curriculum for this course. 

Outreach to individual schools has proven to be an effective way to introduce or help schools utilize GIS.  By working with the Master of Science Educational Technology program at Ramapo College in New Jersey, we are able to more effectively demonstrate to teachers the potential benefits of GIS for K-12 curriculum in a variety of subjects.  In this presentation, we review how the GIS4Kids program has evolved from a single project to a curricular application for primary-school education.

 

* this is an abstract I submitted to URISA International Conference presentation 2008 at New Orleans**