Building a Geospatial Partnership-Using GIS to Support Historical Thinking

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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