ESRI T3G Institute Brings Teachers Together to Share GIS Expertise

Recent advances in geographic visualization tools have piqued the interest of the general public in maps and basic mapping applications. The challenge for educators who use GIS is to guide their students beyond a simple snapshot of the world and into analysis. T3G provides teachers with those necessary skills.

“Many formal and informal educators use GIS, but we’re looking for 30 who are currently helping other teachers with GIS instruction,” says Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI education team, schools manager. “T3G helps these leaders turbocharge their work with other educators who, in turn, help a wider array of youth use geographic visualization and analysis to build content knowledge, career skills, and community engagement.”

The weeklong institute will offer attendees opportunities to expand their GIS skills in areas including cartography, spatial analysis, and data management. In addition, they will be exposed to best practices in teaching GIS and introduced to ESRI’s latest software. Networking is another major benefit because T3G will provide the opportunity to exchange ideas and teaching strategies with fellow educators and develop lasting professional relationships.

“It was the opportunity I had been waiting for: an intensive program for educators that enhanced my teaching of GIS and helped me instruct my colleagues in GIS implementation,” said Margaret Chernosky, T3G 2009 graduate from Bangor (Maine) High School. “Among many things, I learned strategies to engage students in more inquiry-based instruction.”

T3G 2010 will be sponsored in part by the National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence (GeoTech Center), an organization that supports GIS learning initiatives among the higher education community. GeoTech Center is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Additional information, including the application, can be found on the ESRI T3G Institute Web site at http://edcommunity.esri.com/t3g. Applications are due by November 30, 2009, and institute invitations will be sent by December 18, 2009.

###

About the GeoTech Center
In 2008, the National Science Foundation funded the National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence to support two-year college geospatial technology programs. The GeoTech Center is a collaborative effort between colleges, universities, and industry to expand the geospatial workforce. The partners of the center work together to provide professional development, teaching and curriculum resources, and career pathways and model core competencies for geospatial technicians. For more information, visit http://geotechcenter.org.

About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.