Fall 2013 Newsletter

It has been a busy summer for the COGA coordinators.  In June several educators from Colorado attended Teachers Teaching Teachers GIS (T3G) in Redlands, California.  T3G is week-long workshop for teachers and those who train teachers about GIS.  This year the emphasis was Online GIS.  The functionality of Online GIS is constantly improving and has the potential to be a powerful tool in classroom instruction.  We hope to share what we have learned with teachers throughout the state in the future.  Please let us know if you are interested in organizing a workshop in your school or district.  The week after T3G I collaborated with Shawna Crocker of Project Learning Tree and the Colorado State Forest Service to support the Fire Ecology Institute near Florissant, Colorado.  It was a great experience for teachers to learn about the impacts of fire in Colorado with hands-on exercises and fieldtrips to places like the Waldo Canyon Fire burn scar site.  We will keep you posted about future events like these.  The crowning event of the summer was the National Conference on Geography Education at the beginning of August in Denver.  We hope that those of you who attended got some great tips on teaching geography.  The conference was well received and was a lot of fun.  I led three field trips and everyone seemed to have a good time.  Ken Jennings, Jeopardy champion and author of Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks was a great speaker.  The opening session featured a musician singing John Denver and Kurtis Kelley of Estes Park channeling Enos Mills, the man who spearheaded the founding of Rocky Mountain National Park nearly a century ago.  I hope that all of you mark your calendars for next year's conference which will be held in Memphis, Tennessee, July 31-August 3, 2014. We'll be staying in the famous Peabody Hotel near Beale Street.  In addition to upcoming workshops and presentations noted elsewhere in the newsletter, Rebecca Theobald and I took part in Colorado STEM Education Roadmap and Action Plan Feedback Meetings, making sure that geospatial technology is included in the discussion across the state.  

 

It's almost that time of year again - Geography Awareness Week!  Key an eye out for upcoming communications from COGA about what we have planned to celebrate this important week in geographic education.  In the meantime, check out the official GAW page from National Geographic Education for great ideas that you can incorporate into your classroom to help your students understand how the world is connected:

During the NCGE Conference, several educators from Colorado and around the country participated in a session entitled "Teaching Geography in Isolation".  The discussion ranged from the challenges of having limited resources or students living far from school to concerns about being the only lens through which students learn about history and geography over the course of their education.  To that end, COGA teacher James Wilson organized a community on edmodo about "Teaching in Isolation".  Click on the link below and you will receive a message that says: "Please log in to request access from Mr. Wilson to join the group Teaching in Isolation."  (You do have to join edmodo to participate.)  We hope this group will be able to share perspectives and ideas, whether the isolation results from mountains, plains, or the size of the school or district.

Please take a moment to complete a quick survey from the Colorado Council for the Social Studies.   Its intent is to increase awareness of the issue and provide social studies folks with a means to weigh in.  Your feedback is greatly appreciated!