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Education

@DigiDem helps NYC students map their community and future!

Submitted by jim on Wed, 2010-06-16 23:53

Mark Belinsky of Digital Democracy wrote an article called Future Now: NYC’s Digital Storybook  - it's about his experience working with students in New York City on a webmapping demonstration project.  The students used a modified version of Ushahidi software to map ideas and resources in their community.  You can check out the resulting web map as well, but Mark's article includes some great background information and analysis.

Using maps in Literature class?! Take a Lit Trip!

A "Lit Trip" is a digital tour of the places and settings in a work of literature - think of it like a mashup of Google Maps and your favorite novel!  Lit trips can combine images, text, multimedia, and background information concerning a work of literature, and it can put these elements in their geographically-appropriate places.  Imagine seeing background context for The Odyssey superimposed over a map of the hero's travels, or following along with the Joads as they travel west from Oklahoma to California.

The Google Lit Trips site contains Google Earth based lit trip downloads, divided into age-appropriate groups for children and adults.

URL: 
http://www.googlelittrips.com

ESRI Education Community

Portal with links for ESRI software users in the education field.

URL: 
http://edcommunity.esri.com

GeoMentor - getting geography in the classroom

From the GeoMentor.org website:

"National Geographic and ESRI have created a new program to inspire educators and community members to work together to improve student learning. People who use geography in their work can help educators and youth see the world in new ways. The GeoMentor program is designed to inspire volunteers to work with a teacher or youth club leader to help kids see, use, and do more geography in and out of classrooms."


URL: 
http://edcommunity.esri.com/geomentor/index.cfm

Tutor/Mentor Connection: Leaders in Nonprofit GIS!

Submitted by jim on Sun, 2009-10-11 22:23

example of a map of tutor/mentor connectionI recently interviewed Dan Bassill, president and founder of Tutor/Mentor Connection, a well-respected organization in Chicago that provides extensive mentorship-related resources as well as an online community for tutor/mentor program educators, facilitators, fundraisers, policymakers, and other interested parties.  Dan has long been a supporter of the use of GIS and online mapping in a nonprofit/community context, and T/MC was providing interactive online maps years before the "Mashup Explosion" of this decade.

FlowMap

"Flowmap is a software package dedicated to analyzing and displaying interaction or flow data. This type of data is special in the sense that there are two different geographic locations connected to each data item: An origin location where the flow starts and an destination location where the flow ends. The flow data itself can be people (e.g. commuters, shoppers, hospital visitors), goods, usage of agricultural services or telecommunication and so on."

URL: 
http://flowmap.geog.uu.nl/