Building++a+Geospatial+Partnership-Using+GIS+to+Support+Historical+Thinking

Building a Geospatial Partnership -Using GIS to Support Historical Thinking Charlottesville Schools
 * "The Virginia Experiment" TAH Grant
 * Grant to work with teachers to incorporate GIS in history
 * Went through an activity about VA counties
 * Can use as a jumping off point to talk about VA history
 * Uses ArcGIS for the project
 * Used ArcGIS to demo in this session
 * Used ArcGis to show how Virginia counties, etc. developed
 * When shown over time see that counties started large, sub-divided as population grew (example of how large Augusta county was)
 * Created a dataset of how counties were named -- who named after --- shows what was important in VA at the time the counties were created
 * Showed the distribution of slaves in 1860
 * Students see patterns based upon the thematic maps created
 * Teaching American History Grant
 * One third of a million dollar grant is being spend creating the dataset
 * Not many for historical data
 * Is a dataset of Virginia county boundaries from the Chicago library
 * Entered much of the data they use iwas created by them and entered manually
 * Have 10 teachers are in the program
 * Doint historical research and creating data
 * Will have about 10 projects ready to use out of the box
 * The Virgnia Experiment
 * Speaker series
 * Summer filed experione
 * Teachn fellows
 * Use GIS in the american history classroom
 * Deals with spatial intelligen e
 * Develops it
 * Benefits
 * Students see the link between history and geography
 * Fun visual interactive way to engage students in geography
 * Allos students to see how geography affects polictics and economics
 * Example --- took Ohio river and then started laying in cities according to timeline
 * Need to provide ongoing training for this type of program to be effective
 * Students interact with maps
 * Maps tailored to SOLs
 * Rivers
 * Gegraphic regions
 * Smart board enhances GIS
 * Students "see" the SOLs
 * Some of the spatial themes working on
 * Slavery and civil war
 * Regiosn, waterways, and settlement patterns
 * Today reflects yesterday: virginia counties
 * Constitutional convention and sectionalism
 * Civil war
 * Underground railroad
 * Civil rights
 * Challenges
 * Rpviding technical support and having GIS installed in all the schools
 * Historical gis data - can't create it fast enough
 * Having students use gis as an analysis tool, and instructional/visualization tool
 * Standards based curriculum
 * Time!!! Teachers have a hard time justifying the time needed when they look at their pacing guides
 * Showed a demo of one with westward expansion
 * Students can see why cities developed where they did over time
 * Students could see that the Ohio River really was the gateway to the west
 * Talked about how another project compared 2000 election data and 2004 data…students assume the role of a political consultant and draw conclusions
 * Students generally use the java application
 * http://www.virginiaexperiment.com/ website