Using ArcGIS StoryMaps in the Classroom

hi everybody everybody and welcome hope the uh i hope these sessions have been helpful for you we're thrilled to have you here um we only have 45 minutes i guess so we're going to move relatively briskly because there's a lot happening in the education space so i'm alan carroll i founded the story maps effort at esri and had an editorial team uh that includes my my colleagues ross and laura you want to introduce yourselves briefly hi everyone i'm ross donahue i've been with esri for about three years um i love working with educators like yourself and excited to share the great uh updates to you ara hi everyone i'm lara weiniger i am relatively new to the storymaps team and i love k-12 education and i'm hoping that we can make some big improvements in this space in the next well in the future so over to you allen great laura's al already off to a good start and you'll see a little bit of her work uh later in our program so i think most of you probably know what story maps are so again i'm going to spin through this pretty quickly just in case uh to just give you the basics so story maps uh work on the web of course and they combine interactive maps hosted on esri's cloud service arcgis online and uh and non-interactive maps by the way with multimedia content so photos videos audio and text to tell stories about the world all sorts of stories about the world on all sorts of topics meant for all sorts of different audiences grade levels etc they work on a variety of screen sizes so in other words they're responsive we work really hard to make sure they work beautifully on mobile devices and tablets as well as pcs and to me this is the real secret of storymap success they incorporate interactive builders so you don't need to have any technical knowledge other than just a basic sense of how things work on the web to put together a beautiful story and the heart of our builder function is what we call the uh block palette where you can you can imagine each of these elements as a building block of astoria that you can use to assemble a story and and reassemble and move things around in a very intuitive way there just like the maps story maps are hosted by esri in the cloud and all that means is that it's a convenient place to park this content we don't claim any kind of ownership uh to it and you can link to it uh point people to it these via social media you can embed story maps directly in websites etc um going on uh 10 years ago we started with uh we we began to accumulate what we ultimately what we now call our classic apps so we had a a series of separate apps each of which presented a sort of different user experience but about three years ago um we started work on and launched two years ago of next generation story maps called arcgis story maps and we strongly urge all of you to fully embrace arcgis story maps for a variety of reasons among them this mobile first design updated design in general but especially the fact that there's a unified single builder experience within which you can find things that roughly parallel uh the user experiences in the classic apps so uh please do uh uh try to move to or stick to arcgis story maps it's been really really exciting to see things grow and it's been especially true in the education community but overall now we're actually over 1.7 million story maps hosted on on arcgis online being created and used by many many different organizations like federal agencies and major nonprofits colleges and universities of course and my alma mater national geographic among others and story maps have really really gained popularity in the classroom which is just a one of our biggest thrills so roughly a third of our community is from the education realm either educators or students we will talk more about uh where you can go for more information we've got loads and loads of resources that you can tap so that i'm going to stop sharing and pass it over to ross okay so let me just say that one more time um with that introduction i'm going to show you how to get started with the builder if you've never used it before but then also show you what's new and what's cool with the latest updates to arcgis startups so hopefully you're seeing my screen right now for those of you who haven't used arcgis story match before the easiest way to get started is to go to esri.com story mouse now when you go to this url it'll bring up the product page and this is a really helpful resource to bookmark because we're constantly updating it with new stories from the broader community that can be good examples to show in the classroom uh and have resources by topic in addition we have a number of blog posts as well as stories and instructional material for how to get started but also to take your stories to the next level we also have advertisements for things like our new our next uh live webinars that that happen every other month so these are really helpful resources to remember in addition you can get started with the builder uh by just clicking the launch arches story maps button here it will prompt you to log in and you're brought to this stories page this is where you can go in and edit any story that you've created or revisit stories that are in draft form or that are published i'll also just indicate over here on the left there are a number of helpful links as well as other tools to use so you can go to this explore stories get started these are all really helpful as well as collections and themes and i'll mention those again in a second so again just if you want to get started with the bare bones click new story start from scratch and it launches the builder this is kind of the authoring environment for creating a story so you can simply start typing and you can see it's really pretty intuitive now like alan mentioned there's this block content block builder so if you just click here you get access to all of these different types of media and immersive reading experiences that ranges from text to maps and images video as well as some of the immersive content now we're going to be sharing a number of links that help you get started uh from scratch so for this we're going to go a little bit past those beginner stages and show you the latest updates and things that we're really excited about on the storymaps team that we think could be really helpful in the classroom so i've created a story that's just populated with some content so we can go a little deeper in the short amount of time that we have together i should also note that feel free to use the chat to type any questions you have we've got laura and alan standing by to answer those as they come up so the first big news is this timeline block the timeline block allows you to have a simple user experience to incorporate sort of key dates or a sequence of uh related information this can be good for you know outlining uh you know what you're going to cover in a class setting or presenting a topic that has a very a temporal aspect to it to get to the timeline block you just click the plus button and you go down to timeline now you have two different style options the waterfall or single slide single side i've already created one and i want to just show you how easy it is to switch between these two different layouts so again i'm using this kind of to show the chronological events but again you can use this for a variety of for a variety of uses now to sort of add a new section to the timeline you just click the plus let's add another event we'll put a new date we'll say 2021. and if i want to add an image i just go over here and browse for a image and really quickly i've added a new uh event within this timeline block and so i imagine hopefully this gets the wheels turning around how this could be incorporated into either an existing lesson or an assignment for students that are maybe reporting on a historical event or any number of topics okay the next big improvement is collections so if you aren't familiar with collections collections are a way to package up a number of stories that you've made all in one place instead of creating a massive story that maybe takes 30 minutes to read you can break that up into chapters or maybe assignment 1 assignment 2 or 7 3 and put them all in a collection and in doing so this will make it a lot easier to break up your content so what i'm going to show you is just how to quickly make a collection so right here we're back to the stories page we're going to go to collection here and you can see these are some of the stories that i've already uh put together so let's just click on this example collection now you can see this maybe looks a little different than other collections uh in the past we have different cover options now and this is in the design panel so you can see there's three different layout options you've got this sort of gridded layout this is best for a large number of stories you can see there's you know 50 stories or so in this collection you also have this magazine layout which is a very nice aesthetic again it can work with a large number of stories but um it might be best for a smaller number and then lastly we've got this journal layout with the journal layout it's more of this vertical uh you know you get these small windows all in a nice vertical here and so i urge you to experiment with collections because it can be a really nice way of packaging up and organizing content for your students [Music] in addition you have the ability to change the navigation so this is how you sort of advance through your various stories and you can also change the theme of your stories really quickly now if i want to go in and customize my theme you just click manage my themes and you can see these are all ones that i've created but if you want to make a new theme you can quickly go in and have some fun experimenting with you know the color palette the typography depending on your audience this can just make your content in the classroom more engaging for your students and look a little different than your typical uh presentation um again you know this can be a rabbit hole you can spend a lot of time uh creating a custom theme but i think it can really elevate the content of your stories and engage students deeper into your topics themselves great so if i'm back here i can browse my themes let's go to this demo one i just made and boom you can see that's how it looks i'm gonna go back to that uh story that we were looking at oh yeah there we go and i want to just show you another cool feature that's come out with map tour with a map tour block so we talked about timelines we talked about collections next i want to show you a data driven map tour this is more of an advanced technique but it represents how you can integrate multiple esri apps into one really compelling reading experience so we like to use survey123 which is another esri tool it's really a form-driven tool to engage our readers in storytelling activities one application of this is actually the crowdsource data for a story so we have this block called the map tour block and there's this new feature called start with a feature service what that means is you can take live data and or static data and create a map tour automatically from it now these are submissions from a survey123 and by clicking on it it will now populate this map tour automatically so instead of clicking one point by one point it really automates the process and can create a much richer and faster reading experience again you can always customize your base map you can even add your own base map if you want you can change the color of your points and you can change your layout if you want you do that right here and so instead of um sort of just a item by item list we can use this grid option which for a lot of points can really help create a better reading experience there are 100 points here visualized at once and so this is a really nice way of again taking uh data and visualizing it quickly without having to go individually point by point okay i'm going to move pretty quickly because we have limited time and a lot to cover but um the other thing that's getting us really excited is the web mapping capabilities so you know there's many different ways of incorporating maps into a story something that's really exciting is thinking about which mapping tools can be most appropriate for which age group and learning objectives one thing that we're really excited about is express maps and especially express maps being used in the classroom because it doesn't require a foundation in you know all of arcgis online um you don't need to know how to create a web map it's just very intuitive user experience and it's only getting better so if you go to map new express map you can add points lines even text really quickly and so we'd be really curious to see how teachers are using express maps in the classroom to help students build sort of that foundational knowledge around like points lines and polygons how do we think about spaces and how do we identify them and present them so again you know the assignment might be you know make a map of you know add a point to where you live so i live in washington dc and okay i just added a map now i'm gonna add an image this is not great falls but it'll work for this example you can even change the color of this point again really quickly click done and you know you can you have a simple locator map of washington washington dc now you can also extend this uh to think about other learning objectives so maybe you're talking about the movement of people or brewed x [Music] you can use arrows really easily to you know communicate concepts so again really excited to see how you guys use express maps in the classroom and we'd love to see some chats on you know whether you're using this or not uh to engage your students yet okay in addition i want to share um a couple more uh mapping options that perhaps you know thinking about high school-aged or even higher ed could be really helpful so again we go back to that map block this time instead of express maps i'm going to go to living atlas so for those of you who don't know about living atlas it's esri's cloud data repository these are maps that have already been styled but can be used in any story really quickly and easily so i have a soft spot for cicadas so i'm going to bring in this living atlas cicada map as an example of how you can quickly bring in these kind of pre-pre-made maps um and perhaps build lessons around them but you can see they have nice styled pop-ups um and uh they're really easy to add and you can make them smaller or larger and lastly you can even add your own maps so say you're in higher ed or high school or even younger audiences who have been making uh their own maps um again you can really quickly bring in um bring in maps that you've made yourself here's a hike that i did in near asheville called shining rock wilderness lastly i want to show how you can embed things like a swipe block to be able to show uh analysis or have people see change or uh start asking questions about sort of where and why um so again swipe block is really powerful feature for extending [Music] mapping again you just simply can add an image or a web map i'll add a web map in this case let's go to living atlas environment we'll go to sea level trends and i'll just put a simple um imagery here 3gsm say we wanted to see seal over is on one side and and fire trends on the other there are so many amazing data sets out here to check out but again very easy to add and with a swipe off you can just simply see really quickly uh compare two places at once so with that i'm going to turn it back over to alan and he'll uh kind of go further about what's happening in the classroom that we're observing all right great thank you ross my fingers are kind of sore from typing madly into the chat window so have fun with that that's great we really appreciate all the all the questions uh most of which we can try to answer and if we don't answer them successfully here you can get in touch with us afterward uh and again forgive me for moving quickly you can see my screen right good okay um so uh i'm not gonna yeah again i'm gonna cruise by some of this stuff but we're going to give you links to the stuff we're showing and additional resources so you can take your time later on but this is just a little compilation and story map form of the things that are being done in higher education with story maps we're going to move from higher ed to quickly to high schools and then to elementary schools or education to to show you some of the things that are going on and some of the ideas that are being developed at any rate um this is a story or just a screen grab from a story by laura mcgrath at temple university who provided one example which is a little bit unusual and kind of cool which is putting a syllabus into a story map so she's created a nicely organized story map for her course that goes week by week and and has the reading lists for for each week a much more common use and one that we're really thrilled to see is is for collection pages to be used to aggregate the stories that a class has been assigned so this is a a class at i believe uc davis oh it's a gis class but of course it doesn't have to be a gis class we're seeing things like this for humanities courses and all sorts of things at any rate but students were assigned individually to do stories related to sustainable development goal topics and i'm just going to show show the live version real quick because this is kind of the heart and soul of what really excites us so story maps obviously can be used for instructional purposes but it's when students are uh are creating their own stories as alternatives to uh to to traditional and static research papers that it gets really excited so just choosing at random this is a student-produced stories story on how to what can be done to essentially repurpose abandoned golf courses in the san francisco bay area so this is easy to do if all the students in the class are within one organization or one group it's a little more challenging if they they're there are different organizations but it can still this kind of thing can still be done but of course most colleges and universities have their own uh their own accounts with with all these organizational capabilities story maps of course are also being used for scholarly research and publications and i won't go into detail on this one but this is very uh goes into beautiful detail uh not about the topic and then within each sub sub topic it has a list of uh essentially embed cards um that that'll that allow access to other scholarly uh publications uh field research similarly uh this is a beautiful story academic but beautiful story on uh on archaeological work in the in the middle east with uh with very detailed mapping in 2d and 3d um lots and lots of things are happening within libraries of course at colleges and universities um this wonderful phenomenon of gis librarians are essentially a central place in university libraries that can serve their whole their their campuses and we're doing some research on that with our with my friend dave cowan and angie lee of of esri's education team uh but the harvard uni university library map map collection is one example of stories that they've produced themselves and of course in addition they're performing the service role across the across their campuses another kind of cool innovation is to use a collection in a different way which is essentially to uh to have little ask students to create a little bio of themselves or summarize their project just in an informal way and aggregate those stories into into a collection um there toward the end of the story are links to some additional resources but you can access those later i just wanted to quickly show uh one of the winners at last year's storytelling with maps competition which was centered around the sustainable development goals and done in partnership with the sustainable development solutions network just to celebrate the how how beautiful and sophisticated stories can be even if they're created by students so this this person did a wonderful job of creating graphics superimposing them on on drone footage uh creating a really nice immersive look and feel with uh with with graphics she probably produced on desktop graphics software but incorporating all sorts of graphs and charts this is an immersive section she's created static maps as well as dynamic maps highlighting some of the pollution issues along the tennessee river so just just really beautiful work and of course students being digital natives pick this sort of thing up very very quickly and naturally and are require really very usually very little instruction on how to use the builder itself they just kind of drop in figure things out and are and are off and running i wanted to give a quick plug before i turn things over again to ross uh for this year's storymap competition or we're calling it a storymaps challenge this year on an ocean's theme we're doing this in partnership with national geographic we've just announced the uh the challenge it will launch in in august so this is something you can uh you can let your students uh know about and uh we there are a couple of different categories uh there's a student and a sort of young adult category but more detail can be found on on this uh on this page so with that uh kind of rushed spiel i'm going to stop my share and uh turn it back to ross excellent and i'll be sure to meet myself this time um great so i want to talk a little bit about how we've been observing some innovative uses of story maps for 9 to 12 year uh grade groups as well as uh k through eighth grade um so starting out with nine to twelve uh grades so uh high school age students um you know really uh jason smolinski at uh the fairfax high school has been uh doing some really innovative things growing a geospatial semester program with catherine kiernan and others um i'm not sure if you're on the call right now but i love the work you guys are doing um and this is a story that he created that just walks through sort of his journey to starting this program and how it's expanded um and so he's doing anything from uh you know introductory mapping to actually uh doing analysis with esri's cloud mapping tools so using arcgis online and having students go from you know raw data to analyzing that data to then visually visualizing it and telling a story with it um to a lot of success i think students have been very uh you know the projects they're working on are very relevant very uh real time we're always seeing innovative student projects that really push the envelope in terms of the capabilities of both arcgis story maps as well as some of esri's cloud mapping tools and these students are you know well equipped to go into uh college with a core you know knowledge of these tools to then take it into that those higher ed examples that like alan was just showing um so it's really exciting to see uh these taking off in uh high school age groups again there's this uh fine balance between you know going so deep into the tools that i you know [Music] students might get frustrated with arcgis online but you know always knowing that story maps is a tool to present information whether it's you know uh geospatial uh analysis that happens or if it's even like the humanities you know a secret we don't like to say very often is that you can make a story map without any maps in it but it's a great way of communicating information really quickly and students uh pick it up really quickly um you know catherine kieran often says you know i don't have to give any instruction i just show them how to get started and they're off to the races so particularly with virtual and remote training this has been really successful and our team's been listening to this you know growing need in higher uh in the high school as well as k uh k eight and we have some exciting things coming um that aren't quite ready yet but um you can expect them very soon in the next in the coming months so first there's going to be an education which will be a collection of ways to use curated content um later this summer in addition there's going to be a mooc that's created uh on story maps for educators should be coming by the end of this year so stay tuned for those great resources next i want to talk a little bit about k8 and the potential we see for engaging even younger audiences with arcgis story maps laura in particular has been spearheading this effort and thinking about how could we create pre-formatted templates for her teachers that provide a starting point for engaging younger audiences as well as older audiences what i think was really innovative here is you know we often think of storymaps as tool for you know older students but we can really adapt it here for a younger audience um and so we're innovating with how to come up with a structure for a story that's geared towards the learning objectives and curriculum of caitlyn um something that laura did and i don't know if you'll hear this do you have a teddy bear have you seen a grizzly bear at a zoo if you can't hear that um lara is reading the text here and so you know in addition to k-8 these stories can be really great for people um with learning disabilities or at different leading levels and so in doing so it extends the audience and creates you know educational content that serves a more a larger audience than we typically see you know groups like ours paying attention to so really want to expand the number of audiences and we can bring in things like maps that start to engage people you know before that you know uh social studies or geography course in high school um they can really get exposed to these concepts a lot at a younger age through things like um destroying words um so we're excited to continue to explore these concepts um we'd love to see in the chat whether you think this is a this would be a helpful uh it would be helpful to have more resources like this for k-8 and your colleagues that perhaps you interact with um we're also curious you know would you be interested in pre-formatted stories that teachers could copy and customize um and use in your classroom and adapt um you know there's also you're probably familiar with the geo inquiries uh project and we've been thinking about how to convert those from pdf format to an interactive format like this um [Music] so with that i think i'm going to stop sharing my screen and we want to make sure that we answer the questions you guys have and so i'll stop sharing and happy to take questions feel free to type them into the chat and um and would love to uh help you know target the rest of our time to uh to make it useful for you guys hopefully you found what we've done so far useful um you might have noticed that lara shared a document that has a series of links including some of the stories we presented here today so there was a question will there be a more detailed training at a later date um thanks for that question there's a couple different ways to engage um with training so you know there's the learn arcgis hub site that's a great resource has a lot of um training material there um we also have an event coming up on thursday this week called story maps live story maps live is where we have a featured storyteller who presents how they're using arcgis story maps um and we give a brief demo of the latest features that have come to partial story maps um and go from there so uh we'll put the link to that i can get that link below somebody else answers some questions any other questions people have one of the many things we're interested in doing for the education community is that we've been talking about but haven't really accomplished yet very much is to do instructional stories so some of you might be familiar with geo inquiries for instance we've done a little bit of experimentation on doing doing something exercises like those targeted to specific grades and curriculum items in the curriculum et cetera uh but in the form of this of a story map that might have a survey uh uh using our survey123 app embedded within it so i'd love to hear from you if there's if there's interest in that you think or if you think there's potential in in that area okay i guess i'm seeing a couple of yeses uh looks like here's a question for college classes how do you upload maps from special collections and story maps okay so it depends on whether map is static like in an image or whether it's an interactive map and so if it's an interactive map that's hosted on esri's uh you know arcgis online you can simply just click that map block and then and locate it from there if it's a static map you can add it directly in as an image this that just using the image block now a sort of hybrid approach which we've started experimenting with is actually to take historical images and geo-reference those in a web map and then you can bring that in to a story and use something like the swipe block to see change over time for instance if it's a historical map or you can actually you know use map choreography and some of the other functionalities when it's in that web map format hopefully that helps okay okay is there a site where teachers can share resources and search resources and pre-made lessons by topic state standards content area and grade if not it should be great to develop um completely agree this would be a really helpful resource and there are a couple of things that we've included in that in this in let's see so there's the hub site that laura shared um and then there's also um national geographic society their education group is doing amazing things and they're starting to use uh story maps more and more and so uh there's a link in that document to their educator resources page and most of that is leveled for different uh age groups so i would definitely check that out and ross can i jump in here for a second please um just to clarify the the hub site is the educator content gallery it's not quite ready for release yet we are planning on having people use that as a supplement to their their lessons um the the stories that it's primarily story map resources that will be included in there and um the long-term plan is to make it available for teachers to submit content that they want to use as well the the beta seed content will be stories created by esri's story maps team or other esri employees and i have matched them up with mostly science or or geography standards and they'll be tagged as such and with grid grade levels associated with them however um the reading levels are not an exact match so you'll have to use your professional judgment when choosing the content and as mentioned i'm not exactly sure when that will be released to the public but the the newsletter for the education team should have that resource available when it's ready to be released publicly i would also give a shout out to misery press they've been putting out some really exciting story content but also great books for different age groups i see a question from deb if a university student has never made has never been on esri and i science growing up what is the reasonable amount of time to allow for the learning curve plus prep and completion of the assignment great question deb and of course you probably already know it depends on the scope of the assignment and the project itself now story maps itself uh the learning curve is isn't super steep um you can get started really quickly i think where there's some frustration or where things start taking longer is if you don't plan out your story beforehand or think about your audience and various components of your story beforehand so you know how will your how will you you know how will you assemble your story what will the narrative be what what's the story you want to tell before you get into the tool the tool itself is pretty easy to use if you have your media and your maps and your text already created yeah megan dixon in the chat window had a nice response she said i would advise about two weeks at least if students can write good texts and compose a powerpoint they can do a nice story map allowing time for editing and verification of good citations is important those are those are great points so yeah i think that two weeks is more about being uh kind of conscientious and more in you know in terms of scholarship and communication skills than than about the the mechanics of building the story itself yeah these are great great questions i think we might be out of time to the end of our time but it's so exciting to uh to see all your messages and really the work you guys are doing is so inspiring to us all so if you have more feedback for the product or you know have resources you want to share we're very active on twitter arcgis story maps um but also feel free to get in touch um yeah thank you thank you so much it's been a pleasure and an honor to join you today uh looking forward to seeing most of you in person next year thanks so much you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 178

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Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, Education Summit

Id: 5pfawrNQKR0

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021