The Why of Where Workshop: GIS in Education - CANCELLED

The Why of Where: GIS in Education - This year’s National Service Project is “Strengthening Foundations of Learning”. One of the ways that you can do this is by helping other teachers in your school or district use GIS in their own classes. You might be asked to teach their students, develop online materials, or you might be asked to teach the teacher! We are offering a very special Why of Where training workshop to help you figure out what to teach and how to teach it. The first thing that you’ll need to do is to partner with one or more teachers and determine what specifically they want to teach with GIS and what standards will need to be met. To help you with this, you will need to work with the teachers before this workshop to fill out the GIS in Education Project Checklist. You are encouraged to contact Robyn Lane and Malcolm Williamson at east_support@cast.uark.eduto help prepare for this very special training.

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. 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: this one, specifically for this year’s National Service Project, and one for all other student-selected projects. Each school will send a team of 2 to 4 students who 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 preparation 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:

1.    New requirement: At least one week prior to training (and earlier is better!) submit a completed GIS in Education 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.