Does using GIS promote children’s understanding of environmental issues?

Key Findings

Reports from the teachers concluded that using these tools had contributed to the children’s understanding of environmental issues as:

• Links from InfoMapper to external web-sites on climate, population and settlements enabled the children to ask questions to start their investigation

• Access to other schools published work in the Resources Library enabled the children to compare and contrast their own locality with other settlements

• “Turning layers” on enabled children to quickly access many pages of resources about a region or particular settlement

• The Independent Maps feature enabled children to contrast two different localities by displaying maps of each area on the screen at the same time

• Clicking on a “hot-spot” (hyperlink) to view a photograph or video of a feature helped children interpret maps accurately

• The “popular layers” feature enabled the children to read daily newspapers from all around the world and view places using the *web cams link

* not all schools in the project could activate the web cam link to places around the world