Abstract
Good News / Bad News: GIS in the History Classroom
Track: Teaching with GIS Across the Curriculum
Authors: Rick Thomas
The good news is that GIS has a definite place in the history classroom. It can be used to provide geographic context, to facilitate explorations of data that were previously not possible for secondary students, it provides opportunities for students to improve critical thinking and spatial literacy skills, and it motivates and is fun. The bad news is that there are significant obstacles to developing curriculum materials involving GIS in the history classroom. These include the use of maps lacking in accuracy and unknown projection making geo referencing difficult, lack of or imprecise locational information in data sources, boundaries that have changed over time, changes in imagining technology, and source data that is most often not electronically accessible. Each of these problems will be discussed within the context of curricular examples and resources for dealing with them.