Wellington - Teachers upskill in ArcGIS

On 27 October, it was a privilege to host 11 teachers from around New Zealand (but mostly Wellington) at Eagle Technology House. The day was dedicated to enabling the teachers to upskill in ArcGIS Online. There were seven schools represented in the room and in some cases there were multiple teachers from a school attending.

Most of the schools represented on this training were exploring options for introducing GIS into their classrooms in 2018. So we started out simple and all the teachers created some map notes on a web map reflecting the tasks set out in the ArcGIS Online basics – Editing school lesson. We then expanded to adding layers from ArcGIS Online to the map for example the New Zealand Deprivation Index layer. This layer always generates a good discussion about why certain areas, such as the CBD in Wellington, appear as deprived in the map!

We then took a stroll through Story Maps (both worldwide and local) and Geoinquiries localised to the New Zealand school curriculum that are available at http://www.eagle.co.nz/gis-schools. Then we plunged into the NCEA level 1,2 and 3 resources available on the GIS in Schools website

NCEA Level 1
NCEA Level 2
NCEA Level 3

This generated some interesting discussions about other topics that could have lessons developed around them. These topics ranged over the following topics:

• sustainability topics,
• the use of GIS in conservation
• freedom camping
• water quality
• zombie attacks
• sports related topics
• snow / glacier melt - climate change 

Late in the afternoon we broke out Survey123 for ArcGIS – available with a schools ArcGIS Online account. We created a simple survey that enabled us to artwork, plaque and monument locations in Civic square and the Wellington Waterfront. We then took our devices out into the stunning Wellington sunlight to capture some data. You can see a view of some of the data we captured at the top of this blog. I think the data quality issue might come up again in the classroom after capturing data in the field!

All in all a very successful day and Eagle looks forward to hearing the success stories that come out of the classroom.

#NZGISinSchools