EDUGIS, WEBGIS FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS

N.J. Bakker

Cadastre, Strategy & Policy, Apeldoorn, Netherlands

nico.bakker@planet.nl

The geography education in the Netherlands hardly works with Geographical Information Systems (GIS). In the daily practice of geo-related jobs a lot of GIS applications are used and developed. The demand to well educated employees in the geo-information is growing, but the interest of young people to study geo-related education at higher or university level is still to low. Students who have graduated secondary school have much to little experience with GIS. Therefore different organisations started a program to set up an internet site with a lot of topographical and thematically data and many interactive lessons.

The EduGIS project has as objective to stimulate GIS education in an open internet environment with geo-information, to offer students the possibility to analyse efficiently and more or less independently social problems. EduGIS makes students and teachers aware of the possibilities of working with geographical datasets for analysing spatial questions.

Secondary objects are:

· Creating an educational GIS portal to offer services and geographical datasets, and combining and exploiting them by the application of Open Geo Spatial standards,

· Training teachers in working with GIS in the secondary education,

· Develop lessons with GIS and test and use these the secondary education,

· Offer editors a national platform to develop GIS oriented lessons,

· Stimulate the development of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure by means of disclosing geographical databases,

· Establish an exploitation plan for a durable management of the EduGIS portal.

This project is subsidized by the Dutch SDI innovation program “Space for Geo Information”. This means that the program is paid 50% by this program and 50% is paid by the participating partners. The 10 partners are from different organisations: universities, schools, software developers and data delivering institutions.

The project started in 2005 and will be finished in 2009. But at that time the project should continue in a formal organisations structure.

The website www.edugis.nl with a lot of topographical base maps and thematic layers is already available and several GIS internet lessons are developed and tested. Also PDA equipment is available for schools to do field exercises with GPS.

This paper describes the structure of the project, the realised products and experiences with students and teachers.