Introduction

I am Alex Day-Blattner, a chemistry teacher at Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta, near Los Angeles, California. I grew up and was educated in England in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. My chemistry degree is from Oxford University and it is now a very old degree. I'm a little sad that I didn't appreciate my subject and the teaching style of my university more earlier in my life. I now know that my degree helped me transition to a life in a foreign country, work as a paralegal, volunteering as a PTA treasurer, and being a life long learner.

There is More to GIS than I could have imagined

Spending five days at the ESRI International Users Conference in San Diego was a crash course in the world of GIS and perhaps the only way for me to recognize the enormous scope of GIS technology and to begin to imagine what it might be possible for my students to do with GIS skills in the future.

The key note address and speakers were inspiring and introduced me to some beautiful maps and uses of maps. Richard Saul Warman talked about the grammar of informaiton and his passion to find patterns as he travels from not knowing to knowing. He said that "understanding precedes action." I can't tell now from my notes whether he meant that for him understanding precedes action or whether he thinks it is true for everyone. It seems to me that I was and am struck by this idea because for many of my students actions come first, without understanding or even attempts to understand, and that this order of activities contributes to frustration and lack of progress, which in turn leads to more aciton without any understanding and a resulting lack of interest in learning in the future.

Warman also talked about how important questions are, and lamented the fact that most of our questions aren't any good. This too strikes a chord with me, since as a teacher of science my desire is to teach my students the sorts of questions that might lead to productive questions that can be investigated and lead to discoveries. But, it is precisely this skill of formulating meaningful questions that I have least confidence in in myself.

Warman's comments about "the first law of understanding" being that "you only understand something relative to something you understand" is what we try to do in our classrooms - building on previous experience and starting from where the student already is. Of course the problem always remains that the teacher undrestands something based on their understanding after a much longer and different series of life events than their students. From the opening speeches at the conference on through the week of new experiences and stimuli, I had been made aware of thinking and questioning. "What am I hearing/seeing? Is the data understandable by me? What needs to be done to make the data more understandable?" It was so invigorating to be thinking about the world from a new perspective, and unexpected.

I loved looking at beautiful maps, and then later learning how to look at maps and posters to find out if they actually communicate the information they set out to communicate, or if the message gets lost somehow. It was amazing to see how people all over the world are using GIS technology and map making software - to plan cities, to predict shadow effects on existing buildings from proposed buildings, to show escape routes in 3 D, to plant crops in driver-less tractors, for emergency plans for fires and floods and earthquakes, for saving money by overlapping data layers to pin point businesses without licences, all sorts of amazing and, for me, unimagined uses.

The week was exhausting and stimulating and mind expanding and creative and beautiful and I came home and talked and talked about what I'd seen and what other people are doing, and I was thoroughly inspired and excited. Everyone there was excited about what they were doing or finding out and obviously loved their jobs.

Conclusion

I had thought the Geology of Disasters: A Hazus Training Course was a very good idea.  to have students learn a hands on skill with an emerging technology and to be introduced to academic content that enables them to understand the use of the technology sounded good to me. The ESRI conference let me really catch a glimpse of the enourmous and wonderful possibilities for the applications of GIS technology in the world. There are schools in Alaska already where all students are issued GIS hand held responders and they are starting work at 17 for mining companies at $75,000 a year. Providing our students with access to skills with GIS technology and mapping software is not a good idea, its a brilliant idea.