Curriculum development

Using Global Information Systems (GIS) software across the curriculum

Project description

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software has been used in commerce and industry for some years and one or two school level versions have been used for a while in geography teaching but it is only recently that industrial standard software has started to find its way into schools. Even so, its use is almost always confined to geography departments. However, industry standard GIS are powerful teaching and learning tools that allow the presentation and analysis of many sorts of spatial data and their potential in a wide range of other subject areas has so far been overlooked.

At Leeds Grammar School, we have been involved in a two year collaboration with ESRI (UK), a company that has started to make its ArcGIS available in a schools bundle, to look at how the application might be used across the curriculum.

We have created a range of teacher-led and pupil-centred activities and lessons for History, Physics, Religious Studies, Biology, A level Maths and Business Studies and A level English Language, as well as Geography. The scope of the material is large and includes charting the progress of Black Death across medieval Europe, network analysis, mapping regional dialects, looking at global biodiversity hotspots, investigating how infectious disease spreads and finding out about world religions. The software is being used in five departments in the school.

In ten years time, GIS will be a standard desktop application like Word or Excel. This project shows why HMC schools should be sharing its potential.

Benefits

Exposure to a widely used industry standard application that barely features in schools at present that offers tremendous learning opportunities by allowing spatial data to be queried, processed and analysed. It causes pupils and teachers to ask questions and then gives them the means to answer them.

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