Introducing students and staff to classroom based GIS
Nobel School – Summer 2007
Nobel School is an 11-18 mixed comprehensive school of approximately 1200 students. It is located in Stevenage,
Hertfordshire. The Geography department consists of 3 teachers (all geography specialists) all of whom have taken part in
the GA Spatially Aware Project this year.
The department has experimented with ARCView in the past however this had proved difficult to get onto the school
network. The school was keen to encourage students to use GIS and collaborated with Paul Zukowskjy at the University
of Hertfordshire in 2004/5 and 2005/6 in the running of a KS3 GIS Geography Master class.
To introduce students to GIS, it was decided to focus on Y10 GCSE students and to incorporate digital mapping into their
coursework. One member of staff attended INSET on the 2012 London Olympics run by Bob Digby and Andrew Church,
through Philip Allan Publishers. The training day included a field visit to a number of key Olympic locations, in particular
the Olympic Stadium and Village. At the end of the course, teachers were provided with all the materials required to run a
field trip for students.
The department decided to use this as the basis for GCSE Coursework (OCR Syllabus C – Bristol Project) and students
and staff visited the sites in June 2007. On their return to school, students collated their data in order to look at the
environmental impact of the Olympics and the benefits and challenges for the local community.
It was decided that students needed to incorporate secondary census data and that Digital Worlds would enable them to
do this. Live Local was also introduced to the students so that they could annotate information onto maps and aerial
photographs. Students have used Multimap lower down the school and some opted to use a mixture of the former and
latter.
Students were introduced to Digital Worlds using a projector so that the class as a whole could be shown how to use a
basic shape file and then shade it to contain Census information. The idea behind starting like this was to enable the
students to produce a chloropleth map quite easily before introducing them to the other uses of GIS.
Students loaded the London shape file from the Census information provided at the Spatially Aware Training Day and
then inserted data showing a variety of forms of deprivation. added. Students were then asked to compare the data shown
with the area chosen for the Olympic sites, the Lea Valley. For the majority of variables, the census information shown an
area in need of regeneration.
The following benefits and problems were noted during the lesson:
Positives / Benefits
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Students were excited by new software and are keen to use it for more complicated procedures. This gave them a
good introduction to it.
All students word process their coursework reports, but this also helped improve presentation of coursework.
Students learned new skill. The skills aspect of the coursework is worth 50% of the marks available.
Independent learning – students had to link findings with ideas taught in the classroom and field. i.e. Area of low
income / high unemployment chosen to host and Olympics and regenerate.
Transferred knowledge gained in KS3 to practical application. Students have heard of GIS (e.g. location of
superstores) but not used one.
Pupils were encouraged to integrate their writing and diagrams to form a more cohesive report.
Challenges
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Initially it was quite difficult and time consuming to load the software onto the school network and staff laptops.
Although the recent upgrade loaded quickly onto staff laptops, we have had to wait for IT support to have the time
to upgrade the network.
Students varied in confidence about using the software – some ‘copied’ staff but others were happier to explore the
application.
Census data doesn’t have ‘units’ therefore students were not able to give examples for different London Boroughs.
Not all students were completing same coursework – competition for computers and teacher support.
All the students have now included a GIS generated map of London as part of their results. The extension to this is using
an OS map of the area which we have been able to access through the OS project. Using Digital Worlds, Bob Grinham
has added hyperlinked aerial photographs which the students can access.
Updates
Further developments have taken place and these have led to a greater use of the promise offered by the Digital Worlds
package.
Whilst on the field trip it became apparent that many of the students failed to comprehend the overall scheme for the
Olympic Park and therefore we made an effort to illustrate some of the key concepts by creating a series of layers which
enabled the nature of the development to become clearer. We were able to access high quality maps through the
Mapping for Schools Project and we supplemented this information with aerial photography from the Digital Worlds
Project Team and High resolution Land Use maps from the Ordnance Survey. In addition we incorporated photographs
that we had taken on the day, together with the results of the pupil surveys. We also made use of the “Virtual Earth”
programme to examine the area in detailed high level aerial photographs as well as to create a fly through which we then
edited in “Windows Movie Maker”
Caroline Hones and Bob Grinham November 2007.
Students able to identify
area of deprivation and
compare it with the areas
that they visited.
Lea Valley and location of
2012 Olympics
Lighter shades = Lower
levels
Employment Levels (2001 Census)
Health Levels (2001 Census)
GIS maps produced by Y10 student in Digital
Worlds and saved as JPEG so that it can be
inserted into Word.