collaborative development of secondary school internet mapping activities

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Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities Dr. David M. Diggs, Dr. Phil Klein, and Anthony Lopez http:// geography.unco.edu/sbc

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Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities. Dr. David M. Diggs, Dr. Phil Klein, and Anthony Lopez. http://geography.unco.edu/sbc. Project Goals:. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet

Mapping ActivitiesDr. David M. Diggs, Dr. Phil Klein,

and Anthony Lopez

http://geography.unco.edu/sbc

Page 2: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Project Goals: Create a series of short internet-based exercises that look at spatial relationships among world biomes, major climate regimes, major soil groups (according the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization—FAO), and relative fertility of those soil groups

This presentation describes 1) development of the project; 2) the collaborative process; and 3) some of the project’s products and problems.

Page 3: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Project History: Univ. of Northern CO has a long history of service to K-12 Geography Education Community.

Undergraduate student with interest in soil fertility and biomes (developed during Resource Management class).

Student (a GIS emphasis major) took upper-level course for future K-12 Geography teachers.

Student decided to do class project on creating an ArcIMS site for teaching about biomes and soil fertility.

Evolved into project that became available on the web.

Page 4: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Collaboration approach:

Page 5: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Undergraduate Student

Produced ArcIMS service and website.

Data manipulation on biomes and soil fertility.

Conceptual document on how the website could be used to teach about biomes and soil fertility.

First draft ArcIMS website (ultimately—not used)

Page 6: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Geog. Ed. Professor Used a poorly done map of world soil fertility for many years (bad projection), redrawn by hand on Robinson projection.

Associated this with climate maps.

Lack of learning materials (geography) focused on soil fertility, biomes, climate, and soils.

Needed “Guided Inquiry” process, with scaffolding of activities to guide secondary students.

Page 7: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

GIS Professor Aided student during his ArcIMS development phase.

Database problems—USDA Soil Taxonomy System. Need to use World Reference Base (WRB) Soils (1974, 1988, 1998).

Soil Fertility (Van Velthuizen 2007) important.

Van Velthuizen, Harrij, et al.  2007.  Mapping Biophysical factors that influence Agricultural Production and Rural Vulnerability.  Environment and Natural Resources Series 11.  United Nations, FAO and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis.  Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a1075e/a1075e00.htm Last accessed: 4/16/2009.

Page 8: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Let’s do something with this!

See if there is interest (Geog. Ed. Prof. contact teachers).

Small amount of funding.

Need to keep it simple—think audience.

Develop some draft ArcIMS websites/services and associated learning activities (GIS professor).

What now?

Page 9: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Database needs and problems: The easy stuff: collapse WWF biomes to generalized biomes; basic climate map; and reference layers.

Soil database. Fertility descriptions use 1988 WRB. We thought it best to use 1998 WRB.

Soil Fertility based on verbal rating of soil suitability for agriculture (Van Velthuizen 2007). Initially we converted it to a 10 point ordinal scale.

What about alignment?

Page 10: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Pre- and Post Design:

Activity One

Page 11: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Activity Two

Activity Three

Page 12: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Simple portal website:

http://geography.unco.edu/sbc

Page 13: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Learning Activities

3 ArcIMS websites, 3 activities.

Activities lead to the discovery of important geographic concepts (via Guided Inquiry).

Extensive scaffolding of the activities is necessary to guide secondary student to these discoveries.

Page 14: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Learning Activity example:

Page 15: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Testing Final revision of the materials involved classroom testing of the activities and website.

A recently retired teacher, with many years of experience teaching in middle-school, was hired to develop the activity ideas into a format usable in the secondary classroom.

Tested in 9th grade geography course in Denver-Boulder suburbs.

Page 16: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

“the best, most friendly GIS lesson” she had ever used, commenting that it meets both geography and earth science standards, making it useful both in middle-school social studies and science curricula.

Linked to literacy standards.

Students liked the exercises.

HOWEVER, early in the testing phase it was clear that we needed ancillary materials.

Testing

Page 17: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

WRB 1998 Soil Groups

Major Biomes

Major Climates

Page 18: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Conclusions

http://geography.unco.edu/sbc

Active involvement of all participants resulted in dramatically improved websites and learning activities.

Cartographic and technical decision-making was often a process of compromise due to software and database limitations.

Funding and time constraints do not necessarily doom an idea!

Despite these constraints it is still possible to create learning materials that are pedagogically strong, have relatively appealing cartographic design, and are deemed valuable by secondary teachers and students.

Page 19: Collaborative Development of Secondary School Internet Mapping Activities

Author InformationDr. David M. Diggs and Dr. Phil KleinGeography ProgramSchool of Social SciencesCollege of Humanities and Social SciencesCampus Box 115University of Northern ColoradoGreeley, CO [email protected]@unco.edu

Anthony LopezGIS ScientistNational Renewable Energy Laboratory1617 Cole Blvd.Golden, Colorado 80401

AcknowledgementsPartial funding for this project came from the Colorado Geographic Alliance. Thanks to Paula Sinn-Penfold for extensive help in developing and testing the worksheet activities. Also a thank you goes out to Scott Allen, Monarch High School, Louisville, Colorado

http://geography.unco.edu/sbc