A science teacher from the US has been creating virtual grafitti adventures. Using his GPS as a paintbrush,  his bike, and I’m presuming a very big bowl of pasta the night before, he creates wonderful artworks on top of his city. Check out his website and let us know if you feel the need to get on the bike and create! Very fun stuff.

So, download the software here.

See our previous posts on QGIS here and here, they tell you how to get data and access support for the software.

Finally, check out Contour Education’s YouTube channel with two (so far) videos for QGIS up showing you how to download and install QGIS and the basics of the software.

Good luck, remember that we are looking for ‘champions’ from our group so any of you there on the day jot down ideas for classroom use and we can start thinking about developing resources for teachers.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the resources we used on day one of the course:

Ordnance Survey GIS Zone

This site outlines what a GIS is, how GIS is used in the real world and also gives you some great games to begin introducing the concepts of layering information and geographic databases.

Geospatial Revolution

The Geospatial Revolution. We didn’t go through this on the day…silly me, but it is a great resource for giving you, your staff and your students an understanding of what this spatial tech stuff is all about. More importantly, the four videos (episode one embedded below) cover a wide range of applications of spatial tech from business, government, natural resource management, military, climate change and development. Also, very high production values will engage your students.

Geoscience Australia

Geoscience Australia have a great range of resources online, the Sentinel bushfire mapping site is covered in one of our resources for teachers. Today we had a look at the MapConnect tool as a way to view basic geologic, topographic, landuse, vegetation and other data. Check out a guide to using MapConnect via the ESRI Australia website.

We also looked at the portal pages very briefly. Just like the Hazards portal, you can find Energy and Minerals portals that take you through to well-collated pages of really useful information, maps and other resources.

I also came across the Australian Mines Atlas which looks really useful as a simple tool to display mine, mineral and processing locations around Australia.

The Googles

Google Maps was our next step. We began with a video and the second in the series is embedded below which covers a few little advanced tips for navigating in Google Maps. See all of our videos on our YouTube channel. You can also get a classroom activity from our Resources page.

Google Earth came next. We covered the basics of Google Earth and then we migrated our maps across quite easily from Google Maps to Earth before we enhanced our view and ran a tour.

Next comes Day 2 – QGIS and GPS, should be fun!

We’ve been busy here over the holidays, mainly eating and drinking but February is well upon us and it’s time to get back into the saddle.

As well as  planning for a website upgrade we managed to begin to fulfil one of our New Year’s resolutions – to squeeze out a few screencasts for educators going over the basic elements of the free, simple spatial technologies out there. The video above is the second in our ‘Google Maps for Educators’ and we have also developed a ‘QGIS for Educators’ series. All videos can be found on our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/contoureducation

We’d love for you to comment, share and use the videos to your heart’s content. We have also made all videos CC licensed so you can share them and use them in your schools as much as you want – don’t forget to share your resources with us though!

The blog is called, appropriately, GIS and Science and if you can read beyond the technical jargon on some of the descriptions you will get a good idea of how GIS is being used in each example. Your students might find the site useful to help them get a sense of why spatial visualisation is critical to many fields of science.

We have PD workbooklets, activities, videos and links that you can use with your students and most of the activities use freely available software such as Google Maps, Google Earth or QGIS.

We also have a special resource that is very top-secret and will be appearing online soon…….can’t say much more but you lot are in for a treat as it is tied to the Australian Curriculum. A draft version of this activity can be downloaded by clicking the image above (of resources, get it?) and we would really appreciate your feedback, in fact your feedback will drive any changes made over the next few weeks.

The activity has students of upper primary or lower secondary, visually assess the health of a waterway at a number of sites. They then use Google Maps to create a map showing the relative health of the sites along their waterway according to the nine criteria for data collection. Students finally select a map symbol that best represents the health of each site before making some recommendations for improvements. Hopefully, a neat and easy-to-use activity to introduce spatial technologies to students. Year 7 looks most appropriate at this stage given the Environmental Resources unit in the Australian Curriculum, recently released……….read on for more juicy details.

Avid readers of this blog or site would understand how committed we are here to getting spatial technologies into schools in meaningful ways. This activity represents a collaboration between Contour Education and a significant player in the world of resource management, and it has been tied to the Australian Science Curriculum and to the Geography Shape Paper; it will be revised to map the current draft verison of the Australian Geography Curriculum once we get your feedback. We know you are busy teachers and time is an issue but your comments below, even after a preview viewing, would be great. This version is yet to be updated with the Australian Curriculum (keep your eyes out for an upcoming post dedicated to the newly released Geography curriculum) but will be mapped in the same way the Science curriculum has been mapped in the document.

Thanks and don’t forget to check our upcoming PD events in Brisbane and NSW!

BEST VIEWED IN HD AND FULLSCREEN (with scaling off)

Midnight Sun: A natural phenomenon occurring in the summer months north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle where the sun never fully sets and remains visible 24 hours a day.

This short time lapse film was shot during the Icelandic Midnight Sun in June of 2011.

You need to have your ’3D Buildings’ layer turned on in the ‘Layers’ section of Google Earth, as well as the ‘Ancient Rome 3D’ layer which can be found under the ‘Gallery’ in the ‘Layers’ section. Have a look at our recent post on getting to know Google Earth and our ‘Spatial from Scratch’ workbooklet which shows you how to use Google Earth.

The game puts you in charge of a catchment with a small population, a budget and a range of choices for you to make to balance economic growth with environmental sustainability, mainly through the quality of the water. On one hand, some choices can make you quick money to spend on technology and better agricultural techniques. On the other hand, these typically poor environmental choices degrade the quality of the water and affect the health of the catchment.

A nice lesson in the fact that all decisions we make involve some sort of trade-off. You also get really good feedback on your performance which can be good if you incorporate some sort of reflection element into your activities. There are also additional resources such as a fact sheet to help you use the resource in class.

Click here to go to the game.