🌐 Course description
Integrating Geographic Information System (GIS) technology into the classroom provides students with the opportunity to utilise the same tools employed in high-demand careers to investigate geographic questions, perform analyses, and explore various themes and disciplines related to geospatial technologies. Students can discover relationships, patterns, and trends through maps, spatial analysis, reports, and charts by working with data. These skills are essential across a wide range of disciplines, including science, mathematics, engineering, technical education, and social studies. This e-module allows educators and students to explore the transformative potential of GIS technology in teaching and learning for sustainability and beyond. Teachers will learn how to leverage geospatial information and technologies to engage students by utilizing spatial analysis to deepen their understanding of historical and contemporary events, while simultaneously enhancing their green, technological, digital, and problem-solving skills. The module also guides accessing ready-made lesson plans across various subject areas and introduces users to the software’s integrated spatial analysis tools. Step-by-step instructions are provided through video lectures and supplemental materials, along with resources for locating and downloading vector and raster data. Additionally, basic GIS terminology and concepts will be covered for interdisciplinary and STEAM education, as well as inquiry, challenge, project, and problem-based teaching approaches.
✅ The overall themes:
- Learn basic GIS terminology;
- Learn what GIS is and how it can be used as a powerful educational tool;
- Learn how GIS is a great tool for STEM projects;
- Introduction of simple GIS analysis tools;
- Learn how to access, download and process vectorised (shapefiles) and rasterized (raster) open-source data;
- Learn how to download spatial data collected from a GNSS device or smartphone app and plot them on a GIS map;
- Learn how GIS spatial analysis can lead to a deeper understanding of content information and its context, especially for addressing different sustainability challenges;
- Analyse and chart data, help make decisions and solve real-world problems;
- Learn how to find ready-made activities and lesson plans for using GIS or incorporating GIS into Education for Sustainable Development (ESD);
- Get ideas to transform your classroom and your school into a GEO-Lab using problem and challenge-based co-design educational approaches.
✅ Learning objectives – Links to the GEO-Academy Unified Competence Framework
Valuing Sustainability
- Knowledge: Understands the connection between environmental impacts and the digital and spatial dimensions of sustainability.
- Knowledge: Understands that human activities, ecosystems, and sustainability issues are interconnected and span across time, space, and scales.
- Skills: Evaluates sustainability challenges and sustainability values, incorporating geospatial data and digital technologies to model and communicate these impacts.
Systems Thinking and Complexity
- Knowledge: Knows that digital technologies and geospatial data play a crucial role in understanding, modelling, and mitigating impact.
- Skills: Assesses the interactions between human and natural systems across multiple dimensions.
- Skills: Uses digital and geospatial tools to explore sustainability as a holistic concept, integrating environmental, social, and cultural factors.
Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving
- Knowledge: Understands the importance of spatial and digital data in framing sustainability challenges.
- Skills: Analyzes evidence and spatial data reliability, developing solutions through interdisciplinary approaches.
- Skills: Leverages digital and spatial methodologies for sustainability problem-solving.
Futures Literacy and Adaptability
- Knowledge: Knows how geospatial and digital tools can model potential future scenarios, accounting for historical data.
- Skills: Identifies actions and initiatives that lead towards preferred sustainable futures.
Political Agency and Collective Action
- Knowledge: Aware of local and regional geospatial stakeholders who can influence environmental and sustainability decisions (GEO-Labs).
- Skills: Engages in collaborative efforts for sustainability through digital platforms and geospatial data-sharing, fostering collective action for local and global change (GEO-Labs).
Information Management and Digital Literacy
- Knowledge: Understands how to access, evaluate, and/or verify the credibility of online data, including geospatial and sustainability-related information.
- Knowledge: Aware of the role open data plays in addressing sustainability challenges.
- Skills: Collects, processes, and visualizes digital and geospatial data using tools like GIS, applying statistical procedures to present sustainability insights.
Spatial Data Skills
- Knowledge: Understands basic and advanced spatial concepts like distance, area, buffers, slopes, and gradients, integrating them into environmental analysis.
- Knowledge: Is familiar with geospatial data types (i.e. raster, vector, tiles, layers) and their applications to real-world sustainability problems.
- Skills: Handles and processes spatial data and GIS tools for geospatial analysis, for example, spatial interpolation, classification and sampling techniques that support environmental decision-making.
Geospatial Tools & Technologies
- Knowledge: Understands basic geospatial tools (e.g., GIS, VR for visualization) and their role in solving or gaining insights for environmental challenges.
- Skills: Combines multiple data layers and performs complex overlays to analyze environmental, social, and economic factors in a sustainability context.
- Skills: Uses network data and pathfinding algorithms to plan sustainable routes for transportation, utilities, or conservation efforts.
- Geospatial Thinking for Environmental Planning
- Knowledge: Recognizes the spatial distribution of resources and environmental impacts.
- Knowledge: Understands that site-specific factors are crucial for sustainability planning.
- Skills: Designs and implements spatial solutions for sustainability, such as optimizing land uses, and transportation, and delineating conservation strategies or disaster risk management using geospatial data.
- Skills: Models diffusion patterns (e.g., temperature increase, disease, pollution) and spatial diversity to address sustainability problems.
🧭 Course structure:
1: Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- 1.1 GIS in a nutshell
- 1.2 GIS data structures and applications
2: Spatial Data Acquisition and Editing
- 2.1 How to find spatial data and maps online
- 2.2 Download data and use GIS applications to open, visualise and export data
- 2.3 Basic processing capabilities and tools for your project
3: GIS and Spatial Analysis
- 3.1 Vector data processing
- 3.2 Raster data processing
- 3.3 Working with 3D surfaces
- 3.4 Multi-criteria problem solving
4: GIS lesson plans for your classroom
- 4.1 Geo-Inquiries, standard-based inquiry activities
- 4.2 The GOSTEAM Inquiry-based approach
- 4.3 Geo-labs activities – transforming my school into a living lab
