Context & MotivationsGIS, Geographical Information System, is a tool that is already widely used in all sorts of businesses: industry, public services,.. Outside the schools, people are using this tool to create, store, analyse and manage spatial data and associated attributes, what might be known as geo-information. This GIS technology is rapidly emerging into several aspects of society and is gaining importance (examples are GPS and digital maps). Many of the European students will get into contact with it in their future professional lives.
Schools in the USA have picked up on this years ago and are gradually integrating GIS in their curricula. They play a leading role in the educational use of GIS. Unfortunately, European schools are lagging behind, mainly due to unawareness and lack of skills among teachers and partially due to the fact that the software to use and study GIS is quite expensive. However, new framework curricula in European school education will include GIS as a learning goal for secondary schools. GI in education is an EC initiative under the IST programme; this proposal complements the activities of this programme.
Given the current situation, as described above, we can conclude that there is a great necessity for European in-service teacher training projects, introducing and developing GIS in secondary education and lowering the threshold for all teachers by creating an easy access to a workable course.
News
27|07|10
An iGuess course will be held at Geel, Belgium from Monday 20 Sept to Friday 24 Sept 2010
02|03|10
From March 3th till 6th, the fourth iGuess project meeting was held at the university of Helsinki.
05|01|10
"Geography and Climate Change" has been designated as the key overarching theme of the AAG's Annual Meeting to be held April 14–18, 2010, Washington D.C., USA