Chapter 4: Beyond Interactive Mapping

For more than a decade, educators have recognized the promise of geographic information systems (GIS) as a technology to support learning through inquiry across the social and natural sciences (e.g., TERC, 1995). The history of GIS in education can be viewed from both a “glass is half full” and a “glass is half empty” perspective. The half-full story is that rapidly increasing numbers of teachers have received training on GIS, many lesson plans and books on using GIS in the classroom have been published, and large numbers of students have had opportunities to use GIS in the context of social studies and science classrooms. As with any educational innovation, though, there is a half-empty story. For GIS, that storyincludes the fact that the overall percentages of teachers and students with GIS experience is very small, that the percentage of teachers who have received training and then go on to implement in their classroom remains small, and that the visions of students using GIS to engage in something approaching authentic inquiry is only rarely realized.