Geography Education in the US
Startling Fact: One in five young Americans (18-24 yrs) can not locate the United States on a map of the world!
“Geographic illiteracy impacts our economic well-being, our relationships with other nations and the environment, and isolates us from the world,” -National Geographic president John Fahey
Here are some activities for children that incorporate learning about geography from Educationworld.com
Map puzzles. Collect state and regional maps from around the United States. Cut selected pieces from those maps. (The size of the “piece” might vary depending on the grade you teach. In the middle elementary grades, the pieces might be about 2 inches square.) Students can use place names, natural features (lakes, rivers), and other clues on the map pieces to try to figure out which state each map piece is from. Students might do this activity in small groups. Each group might have copies of the same five map pieces. Which group can un-puzzle the map pieces first?
Literature around the world. Invite students to identify on a world map the locations of some of their favorite books and book characters. Among the characters that might be included are Paddington Bear (Peru), Heidi (Switzerland), Ferdinand the Bull (Spain), Strega Nona (Italy), Red Riding Hood (Germany), Madeline (France), and Ping (China).
Your town’s growing population. Collect population statistics for your town as far back as they are available. Students can create graphs to show how the town’s population has changed over the decades. How has population change affected the town?
Commuter graph. Help students create a graph to show how far their parents travel to work each day. A different bar will represent people who commute less than 5 miles, 6 to 10 miles, 11 to 20 miles, 21 to 30 miles, and more than 30 miles. Provide a map for students to show the different places people travel.
Map your school region. Create a map that shows the areas in which students live. Invite each student to add a pin to the map to indicate the location of his or her home. What conclusions can students draw from the map? Do more students live in one “region” of the “school region” than in others? Why might that be so?
For more information and activities visit http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson071.shtml
VERTICES, Skip Kielt – GIS Intern
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**
