The Why of Where Workshop: Bring Your Own Project

The Why of Where workshop: Bring Your Own Project

Whether you’ve got a project involving local history, community improvement, the environment, or just about anything other than this year’s National Service Project, this workshop will help you take it to the next level by using geospatial analysis and location-based technologies. By sharing your project ideas with the trainers through the required Project Checklist, they will be prepared to work with the specifics of your project. You will learn how to apply the “geographic approach” and the power of ArcGIS software to your project. Special attention will be spent on finding and developing data for your project, using ArcGIS Model Builder and geoprocessing tools to analyze problems and propose solutions, and sharing your solutions with online interactive web mapping applications. Bring your ideas, bring your data, and they’ll help you take it to the next level!

 The Why of Whereseries moves beyond “technology training” to projecttraining usingadvanced 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. In the past, we’ve always had a project “theme” for each workshop, such as disaster, history, health, etc. This year, there are only be two variants of Why of Where workshops: One specifically for this year’s National Service Project, and this one, forall other student-selected projects. Each school will send a team of 2 to 4 studentswho plan to start or are already working on a project which will include a strong geospatial component. 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, or other mapping apps, 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.

Items to Bring: n/a

Prerequisite: Required preparations for The Why of Where Workshops - 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:

  Prerequisites: 1.    New requirement: At least one week prior to training (and earlier is better!) submit a completed Bring Your Own Project worksheet to phaedra@eaststaff.organd east_support@cast.uark.edu.  2. Your facilitator needs to have an ArcGIS Online Organization account established. Please contact the EAST Technical Support Group if help is needed.  3. Each student will need an ArcGIS Online account in your Organization (see Step 1). They must be added to your license for ArcGIS Pro (also managed through your ArcGIS Online Organization).  4. Each student will need to take the online ESRI training course "Getting Started with GIS" (https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/57630434851d31e02a43ef28/getting-started-with-gis/). 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.  5. 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.  6.  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.