Understanding and Using GIS
"It is not just the visualization of a database that makes a GIS so powerful but its ability to combine multiple thematic layers
for the purpose of answering complex questions." PASDA

Directions: Watch What is GIS? Use the USGS GIS web site, GIS Tutorials, GIS Kids Slideshow..., the Internet
and resources available to you in the library to answer these questions.

1. What does the acronym GIS stand for?

2. What is GIS?

3. What can you do with GIS?

4. What are the tools for GIS?

5. Write three GIS questions about your community. GIS Touches All Our Lives, Everyday might be helpful

6. Pose a GIS question that relates to your school or school district.

7. How could GIS be used to make decisions about recreation facilities or programs in your local?

8. What impact could come from the EMMMA Project?

9. Which area in your state had the highest incidence of West Nile?

Based on these results, should your community spray against the disease this summer?

10. Check out this article about students harnessing GIS to solve a problem, "Students' Mapping Project Could Become Model For State".

Give an example of a GIS related project that teens could do in your community.

11. How is your local, regional or state government using GIS for planning?

12. Name three skills that are important to GIS workers.

Technology reveals new worlds to map

Watch City Buildings in Pictures David Pogue hitches a ride in A9's picture-taking, GPS-equipped S.U.V.

Listen and consider: Google Street View Captures Boston in Controversial Detail

How Google Earth Ate Our Town

GeoWeb - Be a cyber cartographer | The Genographic Project | Geocaching

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered,
you will never grow.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extras:

Map your Watershed | Geographic Inquiry: Thinking Geographically | The Riddle of the Russian Lights
Round Earth, Flat Maps | Dr. John Snow maps & Cholera | GIS and Historical Maps

In 2005, the Snyder County Commissioners notified the borough of Shamokin Dam's elected officials that they would have to change the names of 10 of their streets. Why?

The county was implementing GIS. In doing it, they discovered that there were streets in Shamokin Dam that had the same name as streets in the town of Selinsgrove (Located about 4 miles down the road.) Both Shamokin Dam and Selinsgrove had the same postal address name (Selinsgrove) and the same zip code 17870. For GIS purposes it was important that each street within a zip code have a unique name.

Rather than change the street names, the Shamokin Dam borough officials appealed to the U.S. Postal Service for a unique zip code and to be officially recognized by the USPS as Shamokin Dam. The request was granted.

Only a few Shamokin Dam residents had ever heard of GIS. Some were unhappy because they had to make notifications about the change in their address, just as if they had moved. There are many positives to the change including that delivery services and emergency services could more easily find addresses.

2007 Cynthia J. O'Hora, Educators may print a hunt, exactly as it appears, for use in a classroom setting. Posted 1/11/2007

Make your own Digital Answer Sheet. Save a tree use a digital answer format.