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Manitoba, Canada - For over five years, students of Manitoba's publicly funded schools have enjoyed access to state-of-the-art GIS technology as an integral part of their learning and development. Manitoba's department of Education, Citizenship and Youth (MECY) has recently decided to continue their GIS software license with ESRI Canada, which will enable students and educators to take advantage of the upgraded ArcGIS 9 platform.
"By incorporating GIS into public schools, Manitoba Education, Citizenship and Youth is proactively helping students to think geographically," said Alex Miller, President, ESRI Canada. "We are dedicated to supporting Manitoba's educational institutes and teachers as they empower the next generation with GIS skills to tackle the huge environmental, economic and social problems facing us in the 21st century." In 2003, Manitoba Education, Citizenship and Youth (MECY) recognized technology as a foundational skill to be developed in every subject area and grade, along with literacy, communication, problem solving and human relations. To support this mandate, MECY purchased licensing that provides unlimited access to the world's leading desktop software package - ArcView - in both English and French for K-12 classrooms. ArcView is a complete GIS software package that engages students and enables them to perform spatial analysis, classify data, integrate imagery, interact with the web and create their own publication-quality maps. "I have been incorporating GIS technology into my curriculum for over three years now, and the response from students has been remarkable," explains Rob Langston, a teacher at Neelin High School in Brandon, Manitoba. "With GIS, students are able to achieve learning outcomes at lightning speed and they can accomplish so much more by working with a dynamic application versus static, paper maps. The functionality is also suitable to a range of subject matter - in the coming year - I plan to incorporate GIS into my geography and world issues core curriculum." Teachers in Manitoba classrooms have been taking advantage of the versatile nature of GIS to help students develop a variety of critical skills. For example, in earlier grades, students can use GIS to learn the meaning of longitude and latitude and identify provinces, territories and bodies of water on a map. More senior students can employ GIS to research and identify solutions to real world problems such as the issue of diminishing natural resources in less developed countries. All participating teachers are fully supported through ESRI Canada's Schools and Libraries program that is comprised of three fundamental components - software, data and support. Through this program, educators are equipped with the latest version of ArcView, complete with an ArcCanada dataset that contains an abundance of Canadian demographic, environmental and cartographic data. Teachers also benefit from ongoing support including online training, specialized lessons and tutorials as well as regularly scheduled web seminars to help them get up and running with GIS right away. "For over a decade now, the Schools and Libraries program has been raising awareness of social studies education and GIS in K-12 schools across Canada", explains Jean Tong, Education Industry Manager, ESRI Canada. "In recent years, we have noticed a significant increase in the number of classrooms that are using GIS to help their students develop skills in spatial analysis." For more information on implementing GIS technology in the classroom, please visit www.esricanada.com/education. About ESRI Canada
Amanda Graff Angela Jamieson | |