🌐 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 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
• 1.3 Competences related to GIS and Earth Sciences
• 1.4 Spatial data types in GIS
• 1.5 Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS)

2: Spatial Data Acquisition and Editing

• 2.1 Platforms for data visualization
• 2.2 The QGIS Platform
• 2.3 Spatial data repositories
• 2.4 Download vector data
• 2.5 Download raster data
• 2.6 Working with web services
• 2.7 Processing tools and plugins
• 2.8 Creating new files and digitizing objects
• 2.9 Importing and mapping point data from Excel files

3: GIS and Spatial Analysis

• 3.1 Buffer, clip and intersect vector data
• 3.2 Network analysis
• 3.3 Basic raster processing capabilities
• 3.4 Multi-criteria problem solving
• 3.5 Raster processing – Surface analysis
• 3.6 Interpolation schemes

4: GIS lesson plans for your classroom

• 4.1 The Living Lab Methodology
• 4.2 Geo-Inquiries, standard-based inquiry activities
• 4.3 The GOSTEAM Inquiry-based approach
• 4.4 Open Spatial Resources & Tools
• 4.4The GOSTEAM Learning Scenarios
• 4.5 GEO-Labs: Renewable Energy Sources project
• 4.6 GEO-Labs: Nature-based Solutions for Saving Your City

🧭 Course Logic and Structure

Part 1: Introducing GIS in Education – Concepts, Skills, and Relevance
This first part of the course lays the foundation by exploring the essential elements of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their value in education. You’ll understand how GIS can be used not only to teach geography and science, but also to foster critical thinking, spatial reasoning, and data literacy across the curriculum. Through concepts like data layers, coordinate systems, and spatial data types (vector and raster), educators will gain a solid grasp of what GIS is, how it works, and why it matters. This part is designed to be approachable for all teachers, no prior GIS experience needed!

Part 2: Exploring GIS Tools and Platforms – From Browsing Maps to Editing Data
Now that you’ve built a conceptual foundation, this part introduces practical tools and platforms for visualizing and accessing spatial data. You’ll explore web-based GIS platforms, data repositories, and get hands-on with QGIS, an open-source desktop GIS application that supports beginners while offering advanced capabilities. You’ll learn how to download and visualize geospatial data, connect to web services (WMS/WFS), and perform basic editing tasks like digitizing new map features or importing data from Excel. This section empowers you to navigate real-world data sources and start creating your own GIS-based resources.

Part 3: Performing Spatial Analysis and Designing Educational Activities
This is where GIS becomes powerful and creative. In this part, you’ll learn how to use QGIS to conduct spatial analyses such as buffering, clipping, network routing, surface analysis, and multi-criteria problem-solving. These techniques are essential for tackling real-world environmental questions, from planning an offshore wind farm to mapping urban climate risks. But don’t worry if it feels a bit technical at first, the goal is not to master everything, but to get inspired. You’ll discover how to turn GIS tools into meaningful project-based or hands-on learning activities, bridging STEM education, sustainability, and digital skills development in your own classroom.

Part 4: GEO-Labs and Lesson Plans – Turning Schools into Living Labs for Sustainability
The final part is the most fun and creative! You’ll dive into ready-made lesson plans, inquiry-based activities, and the GEO-Lab methodology, a transformative model where your school becomes a living laboratory for geospatial exploration and environmental learning. Explore topics like Renewable Energy, Nature-based Solutions, and GeoInquiries, and discover how to adapt these activities to your local context. Whether you’re working indoors with digital maps or outdoors with printed maps and students’ ideas, this section offers inspiration, flexibility, and ready-to-use resources to make GIS an exciting part of your educational toolkit.