It’s geography – but not as you know it
February 2010
Kim Thomas
Most of us have memories of school geography that involved drawing graphs showing the rainfall in the Amazon rainforest and writing essays on the principal crops grown in North America. Students still learn about rainfall and agricultural crops, but these days they have the opportunity to use a technology that renders those subjects accessible in a particular vivid way.
The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) became a compulsory part of the secondary school geography curriculum in September last year. GIS is a technology that links data to location, and represents that data visually. It could, for example, combine a map of the UK with population data, enabling you to see, at a glance, which areas are most densely populated.
Useful though that is, GIS can do far more than that. You can take almost any kind of data – epidemiological data, earthquake data, climate data, migration data – and display it on a map or as a graph. You can combine different data sets, enabling you to identify patterns and trends, and you can apply analytic rules to create models of predicted behaviour – using historic flood data, perhaps, to predict future flooding patterns.
Bob Lang, a geography teacher at Five Ways, a selective secondary school in Birmingham, uses GIS technology with students throughout the school, from year 7 to the sixth form. One of the GIS packages he uses is called Digital Worlds, a software tool created specifically for educational use. Bob describes a GIS activity he’s about to carry out with his year 7 students: “In the schools in Bartley Green in Birmingham, we do a local land use survey. We’ll go out with paper maps, and then we’ll come back, and we’ll use Digital Worlds to create a land use map of Bartley Green. It helps students develop skills of how to use a key, how to add a point such as a bus stop, or a polygon for a park or a school. They can analyse the map much more easily [than if they’d drawn it on paper] and spend more time on analysing what the pattern shows.”
Digital Worlds comes equipped with much of the material teachers will need to create a GIS-based lesson: detailed ordnance survey maps, historic maps, aerial photography, satellite imagery, UK census data, crime and population data and indices of deprivation, as well as economic and demographic data about other countries. ESRI (UK), which produces Digital Worlds, has also drawn up lesson plans and worksheets for teachers, and invites teachers from different schools to share their own lesson plans with other Digital Worlds users.
Bob has already been impressed by the lesson plans created by other teachers: “Some teachers have created good lesson plans for earthquake analysis. Leeds Grammar School has produced datasets looking at Dr John Snow’s cholera data, to get students to look at patterns of disease.” A particular bonus, he adds, is that the software can be used across the curriculum, not just in geography. The history department at Five Ways, for example, is using surname-mapping sites to look at patterns of migration, while the maths department uses a GIS tool called Mapminder to carry out population analyses.
ESRI’s Richard Pole says that many teachers are using Digital Worlds for local investigations: “Barking Abbey school pupils go to Arsenal football ground and collect rubbish and noise pollution data. They bring it back into the software and look at the differences in noise levels on a match day and a non-match day and the amount of rubbish that’s collected. As they start to map that each year, they build up an annual survey of noise pollution at Arsenal football ground.”
But does the use of GIS technology have an impact on students’ learning? Bob has found that students’ engagement is much better because even the youngest students are computer-literate and pick it up very quickly. “It gives students more time to do the analysis – they can produce better quality maps more quickly,” he adds. “Traditionally, they used pen and paper, which is still a skill they need to know, but in Digital Worlds, if they make a mistake they can correct it immediately. From the teacher’s point of view, if you’ve got it on your computer, you can zoom into places and show where people are at risk of a particular event such as an earthquake or hurricane.”
Particularly useful, says Bob, is the Digital Worlds swiper tool that allows students to reveal layers of information in a map: “You might have the Ordnance Survey map; on top of that you might have aerial photography; and then on top of that, you might have another layer that you’ve added called population density. This makes it so much easier and quicker for students to see patterns, and they can zoom in or zoom out and look at different areas.”
GIS technology also enables students to make predictions of future events based on current data. One GIS website, says Bob, allows students to work out the rate of erosion on the Holderness coastline. Armed with that information, they can then use Digital Worlds or Google Earth to plot where that coastline will be in 15, 20 or 100 years. Because Digital Worlds comes packaged with historical maps, this kind of analysis is possible for all sorts of scenarios. It’s also possible, says Bob, to import data from outside agencies such as the US Geological Survey, the North American Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Next year, the lower sixth form geographers will be using the BAS data on ice sheet retreat to look at sea level breakup in Antarctica. “A lot of data is now real-time, so it’s not out of date after two or three years,” Bob adds. “You can get crime data from police websites, for example, that is only a month old.”
Soon Bob will be using data from the recent Haiti earthquake to study earthquake patterns with his students – the Edinburgh University earthquake locator uses GIS to display detailed data about earthquakes on world maps 24 hours after they’ve happened. Geography, Bob points out, is a dynamic subject – the world is changing all the time. GIS is a technology that enables students to explore that changing environment for themselves.