Chapter 13: Spatial Thinking: The Key to Success in Using Geospatial Technologies in the Social Studies Classroom

Many geographers and other social science educators have noted the slow rate of adoption of geospatial technologies (GST) by geography/social studies teachers. Although the number of people using such technologies in modern society is growing quickly, they have not been adopted by educators at a rate commensurate with expectations. Since its development as a desktop application for professionals in a wide range of occupations in the early 1990s, geographic information systems (GIS), its supporting science, geographic information science (GIScience), and related spatial visualization tools such as remote sensing (RS), collectively referred to here as geospatial technologies or GST, have diffused slowly in educational contexts and then, largely only into select elite primary and secondary class-rooms. In the United States, despite a decade of efforts by geographers and GIS/RS vendors, GST struggle to win a wider audience among those edu-cators, characterized as respectable early adopters (Longley, Goodchild, Maguire, & Rhind, 2001), who serve as role models and opinion leaders for the majority of teachers.