The Why of Where: Water and Environment

The Why of Where series moves beyond “technology training” to project training using advanced tools. Moving beyond simple point and click operations, this series is designed to assist students through the “process of analysis” to improve their skills in project development using ArcGIS. Each school will send a team of 3 or 4 students who plan to start or are already working on a project in one of four themes: history, disasters, health, or water (choose the appropriate workshop). Teams from each school will work on their projects while having access to and being assisted by GIS professionals. These projects will then be published online as Story Maps to support their local communities and to share with other students throughout EAST. Students attending these workshops are expected to continue, customize, and grow their project upon return to their school. CAST staff will provide regular post-workshop support and follow-up with students to assist, review, and encourage them in their projects. Online maps from the students’ projects will be featured on the EAST website.

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself, “where does my water come from? Is it clean? How do I determine the quality of the water I drink? What makes it clean or not? Is it healthy for fish and aquatic life?” Using ArcGIS, you can do all that and more. In this course, students will analyze public water sources and water quality in their own communities to develop a project framework that can be reused in later projects. Students will be presented with a series of questions, as well as coming up with some of their own, which can be answered using ArcGIS. Their data and results will be compiled as a series of map layers in ArcGIS Online, shared with the EAST community and the public. After completing this course, students will have knowledge of advanced geospatial techniques that can be used to develop future projects 

 ITEMS TO BRING:  N/A

PRE-REQUISITE: Every student that comes to these workshops needs to have some very basic GIS skills. We have identified a short, free online training course from ESRI that covers everything you need to know, and allows you to print a certificate that shows you have these basic skills. Please follow these steps:

1. Your facilitator needs to have an ArcGIS Online Organization account established. Please contact us if help is needed.
2. Each student will need an ArcGIS Online account in your Organization (see Step 1).
3. Each student will need to take the online ESRI training course "Getting Started with GIS" (http://training.esri.com/gateway/index.cfm?fa=catalog.webcoursedetail&courseid=2500). Here's the great part: if a student already knows some GIS basics, they can skip parts they know and go to the content which is new to them.
4. At the end of "Getting Started with GIS" there is a 10-question exam. Each student will need to pass the exam (8 out of 10 questions correct), and save the customized certificate as a PDF file.
5. E-mail the certificate PDF files for each student to east_support@cast.uark.edu before coming to training.

All attending students must complete the above preparation prior to training.