TeachSpatial Blog

Showing children the way spatial information is used in our world can be done in many settings. One of my favorites is using a program my friend Rita Hagevik, developed at Ligon Middle school in NC. The students and teacher created a 10 x 10 meter study site to investigate life (animal and vegetative life within the study site and in the process used the Cartesian coordinate system to mark each point students choose to sample.

Welcome to TeachSpatial Version 2. TeachSpatial is a prototype and a work-in-progress. It is intended to seed discussion, and hopefully, directly assist those who wish to develop spatial learning objectives that span disciplines, or who already have and are looking for teaching resources that might help their instruction.

 Thanks to a small one-year grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education (NSF-DUE 1043777), we have been able to significantly expand and upgrade the site. Some highlights so far include:

In March, 2011 eight researchers from the fields of geography, psychology, earth science, mathematics, cognitive psychology and math education met at a UC Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies workshop to take preliminary steps towards developing a set of spatial literacy benchmarks for college freshmen; that is the set of spatial concepts, spatial principles and spatial reasoning skills they might reasonably be expected to have understanding of and/or proficiency with.