Q & A: Can you use GIS to teach economics?

I was presented this question from a talented colleague who was being challenged by an economics teacher.

Simple answer: yes!

My colleague and I are big fans of GIS and believe that it's a valuable tool in almost any discipline.  I took a few minutes, maybe 5 or 10 minutes to be exact, and created an Economics Starter Map. http://bit.ly/JKRSaR
I opened arcgis.com, clicked map at the top of the page, clicked Add and selected search for layers.  Now, I'm no economics teacher but I did well in that class and know that they would be studying GDP so I did a search for "gdp" and got a list of several layers.  The World Bank has many layers available that also have time sliders that allow you to compare the data over time.  I added those, saved my map, shared my map and now I'm sharing it here with you.  The lesson here is, "Don't be afraid to look for information before you say it's not valuable to what I teach."

Do you have great economics and mapping materials to share?  Comment and share those here!

Happy mapping!

Oh the Places You'll Go: Poems about Places and more

National Poetry Month is just two days away!  So often my students had challenges connecting with iambic verse, haiku rules and lofty language.  It doesn't have to be that way.  Poetry is art and communication all rolled into one.  Get away from the textbook and go to some new places with poetry!


Some cool things to check out if you wanting to help your students connect to poetry.


Try the Poetry Atlas (Poems about Places - Poetry Atlas).

You might like to try some Author studies. An online map is an excellent tool for that.
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a556c54071a54119905d4e3471229ea6


Perhaps a video would help you get going: 

Shel Silverstein has some excellent new resources also! Download the free kit!

Where's poetry taking you this April? Share your ideas for great poetry lessons!

Get Spatial at NSTA

If you're at the National Science Teacher's Association Conference (NSTA12), then stop by Booth #1737 to see my friends from Esri, GISetc and more.

They have lesson plans, free software, loaner gps units, cool geogeek swag and more!

Learn how to do GIS online with arcgis.com! So many cool tools...so little time!

An English Teacher's Guide to Mapping: Part 4 of 4

Last in the series is available...studying journeys!

An English Teacher's Guide to Mapping: Part 3 of 4

The next installment is in!  

Have a look at the video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lig70Y-ZqOY&list=FL6MOEPeLgU4e7KBGvvyJA8Q&index=1&feature=plpp_video


One more video coming your way next week!

An English Teacher's Guide to Mapping: Part 2 of 4, Context & Setting

Check out the latest installment in the English Teacher's Guide to Mapping video series on YouTube! This video focuses on teaching context and setting using geospatial tools!

Gulf of Mexico Maps and Data

Recently the New Orleans office of the National Weather Service hosted an Open House event.  We got to see a weather balloon launched (video), meet a famous female astronaut and see the new emergency trailer.  Always a teacher and always on the hunt for curriculum ideas, I was excited when the staff shared their new interactive web portal.  They've converted all the old maps and made room for new data.  According to them, they'll have lots of data in multiple formats for us map nerds to enjoy.


Check out the interactive mapper here: http://gulfatlas.noaa.gov/


You might enjoy some other data sources associated with weather, NOAA and NWS.