Folks:
Did you know that 10 educators from the Denmark Ministry of Education visited the USGS in Colorado last week? The purpose was to meet with 10 educators from Danish schools and from the Denmark Ministry of Education to discuss GIS and remote sensing in education, and show them examples of these technologies in use in education in Colorado, including visits to:
1) USGS Rocky Mountain Mapping Center.
2) USGS National Ice Core Laboratory.
3) USGS Rock Core Laboratory.
4) USGS National Earthquake Information Center.
5) ESRI Denver.
6) National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder.
7) Emily Griffith Opportunity School.
8) Arvada High School.
9) Boulder High School.
For more information and for photographs of the event, visit: http://rockyweb.cr.usgs.gov/public/outreach/reports/denmark03t.pdf This successful visit was due to the coordination of many individuals, and I hope I am not leaving any of them out in these acknowledgements. I thank my co-coordinators of the visit, Esther Worker, Nancy Bohac, and Marj Dougherty from ESRI. I thank Richard Jimenez for coordinating our USGS RMMC tour, and Liz Lile, Mike Stier, Steve Reiter, Tom Michalski, Eric Cravens, and Geoffrey Hargreaves, the NCAR staff, and the ESRI staff for their explanations. I appreciated Steve Wanner and Phil Pendorf, the Emily Griffith staff, and the NCAR/UCAR staff for being willing to meet with the group.
After their visit to Colorado, the Denmark educators flew to San Francisco to meet with USGS staff in Menlo Park and to visit several science centers. From there, they visited ESRI in Redlands to work with the ESRI education team and to visit several schools and conduct field work in the area with their ArcPad software and other equipment. This visit, and the work that led up to it, is aligned with two of the four recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences in their recently published report, Research Opportunities in Geography at the USGS. First, geographers at the USGS should engage in scientific research. Second, the Geography Discipline should develop partnerships with those in the field of geography outside the USGS.
I met two of the visitors (Torben Jensen and Peter Brøgger Sørensen) during an educational GIS meeting held preceding the 1999 ESRI User Conference. They so impressed me with their vision of what students could do with remote sensing and GIS that I have kept in touch with them ever since. When they and others received a grant from the Ministry of Education to visit the USA to observe and discuss GIS education implementation, I was very pleased that they decided to include Colorado in their visit. The USGS, ESRI, the Colorado Geographic Alliance, and individual teachers have been successfully integrating GIS in education in the state, and it was a high honor to discuss these developments with the Danish educational community. I would like to point out that it was due to these educational partnerships that we have been building over the years that made Colorado the choice for the visit in the first place. We need to keep building these partnerships and create additional ones for the future.
In my opinion, these Denmark educators have worked very diligently over the past several years to ensure that all the necessary pieces are in place for successful integration of remote sensing, GPS, and GIS in education, including:
--software license agreements with ESRI and other companies;
--data agreements with national mapping and other organizations in Denmark;
--support from the top education advisors at the national level in the country;
--interdisciplinary collaboration. The educators represented the disciplines of geography, biology, and physics.
--development of lessons that incorporate the technologies in meaningful and do-able ways for teachers to implement;
--hands-on training sessions for teachers;
--grant money for teachers to develop lessons and attend training sessions;
--close working relationships among the educators in Denmark and ties to educators around the world with similar interests.
The Denmark educators have been:
--developing lessons, online courses, and serving data on www.gogis.dk
--working with the European Space Agency to develop lessons and network with over 700 schools, on eduspace.esa.int. and in many other projects, successfully integrating spatial analysis across the curriculum in innovative ways.
The web site for this USA visit is: www.gogis.dk/03/usa/
Joseph Kerski
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Joseph J. Kerski, Ph.D.
Geographer: Education/GIS US Geological Survey Building 810 - Entrance W-5 - Room 3000 Box 25046 - MS 507
Denver CO 80225-0046 USA jjkerski@usgs.gov
Voice 303-202-4315 Fax 303-202-4137
http://rockyweb.cr.usgs.gov/public/outreach/ USGS: Science for a Changing World
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