GeoSciTeach

Funded by JISC – GeoSciTeach: A teacher-based geo-spatial application for orchestrating scientific fieldwork activity

The project runs from 1^st February until 31st October 2011. It is hosted at the London Knowledge Lab, a collaboration of Social Scientists from the Institute of Education and Computer Scientists from Birkbeck, London

See our project blog for latest updates and progress.

Summary

GeoSciTeach aims to contribute to the geospatial strand of the JISC Infrastructure for Education and Research Programme by developing, deploying and evaluating an innovative application using modern mobile smart phones, that will provide a customisable template for GIS supported learning and teaching. The application aims to increase the use of geospatial tools in teacher training education, and inform future requirements for their integration into teacher training curriculum. The project has three main objectives:

1. To design and develop an application using the advanced sensing functionality of mobile smart-phones, to collect geo-annotated data in real-time and deposit them in open repositories;
2. To design and develop innovative geo-spatial based science learning activities that can be effectively integrated into the secondary teacher-training curriculum, and be made available as teaching resources;
3. To evaluate the application in supporting teacher trainees’ geo-spatial skill development and their ability to integrate geospatial based learning activities into their teaching practice.

The project works closely with PGCE tutors and trainee teachers from the Institute of Education, London, to enable their input into the user and technical requirements of the application; the pedagogical design of the learning activities it is be used to support, and evaluation of the application. While the mobile application is primarily focused on real-time interaction with the users, it will also support data capture in a format suitable for creating visual representations of captured activity data via Web 2.0 mashups, related web-based mapping tools and on-line repositories.