The Council would like to share with you a 2022-2023 budget initiative for WebGIS in California K12 schools. Please see this Story Map for more details and information on how you can help make it happen:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/972c199cceba4e538c752bbd08a8db29
Contact: Marc Epstein, California Environmental Technology Education Network, marcepstein@hotmail.com
I am all for geospatial education at K-12 and beyond. And I don’t mind extra funds to do this to be allocated by the California legislature. But I object to the mentioning of ArcGIS in points #2 and #3 of the letter template as this is nothing but state-sponsored monopolization of GIS by Esri. There are plenty of other nice web-based products out there that would do the job just as well (Carto, UrbanFootprint)
I was going to add MangoMap.com and QGIS2Web…
The mention of ArcGIS Online is an option to make a message more personal. The fact is for K12 ArcGIS Online is the most applicable for accessing data files and used for classroom lessons. The Public Accounts are free and ESRI provide K12 free organizational accounts when used for classroom instruction. In our trainings we do plan to include Google My Maps and bring in QGIS for the most interested. For students using a GIS software I prefer QGIS over ArcGIS Pro. We did promote the National Geographic Map Maker for upper elementary until they changed the interface, making it less inquiry based and more structured lessons based. I will have to check out QGIS2Web.
For those who want to support your child’s school with Esri GIS resources, work with child’s school to take part in the following program: https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/education/schools/schools-mapping-software-bundle
There is a map to see if your school already participates:
https://education.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=c369c6d9bb6d4232bb3ad066cd5b9280
I have found that most of the California schools on that map really are not participating. Most of the time the account was created by a teacher while attending some sort of conference or workshop and never followed up. Most of the time the school in general does not even know they have an account.
Yes, I have had discussions with a couple of folks of getting members children’s schools to use WebGIS. If anyone is interested in actively promoting, let me know and hopefully I can help.