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Track: K-12 Education and Library Science
Donna Wendt
City of Tacoma
747 Market Street Room 900
Tacoma, WA 98402
Telephone: 206-591-2052
Fax: 206-591-2002
E-mail: dwendt@ci.tacoma.wa.us
Teaching with ArcView: South America Geography Project and Bond Election Maps
Defining Issue: The first GIS projects done with ArcView for a school should be easy to implement, fun for the students, relevant to school and community issues, and illustrate how GIS can be a powerful tool. A successful project will not only help the students, but will demonstrate to teachers, administrators, and parents the need to provide hardware and support for teaching technology. GIS Solution: Donna Wendt, senior technical GIS analyst, is working with two sixth grade teachers and one administrator to do two school GIS projects using ArcView, first on a home PC, and later on a school Macintosh. Interim demonstrations are given as the planning of the project progresses. Methodology: The South America geography project has been a traditional large research report for sixth grade students. They have in the past presented a large written report and finish with a parent-attended presentation of food, music, or other aspects of the country chosen by the student. GIS mapping will be added to this
project to show thematic mapping of specific data added to a spreadsheet by students, plus hot links to images, music, and text about the country. When the student completes the work, a picture and paragraph about the author will also be hot linked to the map. A second project for the other sixth grade class will be identifying voting patterns for the failed additional high school bond. Voting and census data will be used together. Students brainstorm strategies for passing the bond in the upcoming election.
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