GIS Tutorial

Basic Workbook

Welcome letter

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Dear GIS Instructor, Thank you for purchasing GIS Tutorial 1: Basic Workbook. We hope you enjoy teaching with our materials. In addition to the workbook, we have included instructor resources on a DVD to make it easier for you to teach your GIS course. This DVD includes: Instructor guides: Sample course syllabus, case study, project, and other instructional documents Lectures: PowerPoint lecture slides Assignment solutions: complete solutions for end-of-chapter assignments Gradesheets: Excel spreadsheets with grading rubric for assignments The paragraphs below describe these materials and how to use them. Again, we thank you for using GIS Tutorial 1: Basic Workbook. We have every reason to believe that youll be very successful teaching GIS. Both students and faculty love this material. Sincerely, Wil Gorr and Kristen Kurland

There are two DVDs that you need to use as instructor. The first is the GIS Tutorial Maps and Data DVD that is in the back of the GIS Tutorial 1: Basic Workbook. For short, we refer to it as the GIS Tutorial DVD, and it has the EsriPress folder that you and students must install on your computers in order to work the books exercises and assignments. The second DVD is one that you as instructor can obtain from the Esri Press website and students must not have, because it includes solutions to homework assignments that you need to grade as independent work. We refer to this as the Instructor Resources DVD. The sections below describe the latter DVD.

Materials in the Instructor Resources DVD

Normally we cover one chapter a week of GIS Tutorial with the first day in lecture/discussion using PowerPoint slides and the second in a computer lab with students working at their own pace, step-by-step, in GIS Tutorial. We often give short demos at the start of labs, sometimes provide a short lecture on the labs content, and discuss the homework assignment. During the lab we answer questions one-on-one with students having difficulties as well as advanced students; thats a lot of fun and you get to know your students better. Its also possible to teach totally in lab, mingling short lectures and hands-on tutorial work. A sample syllabus, 2_SampleSyllabus.pdf, is included in the InstructorGuides folder of the Instructor Resources DVD for a full semester course. For example, we suggest a case study (short project) that students work through on their own after covering five or six chapters. The case reinforces introductory topics and gives students confidence in their GIS skills. Then, we suggest covering the rest of the book followed by in-class and in-lab exams and an independent GIS project. If you are teaching GIS in a shorter course, perhaps 812 weeks, you may be able to cover only selected chapters. We recommend including all three chapters of part I of the book. Then, depending on your objectives and interests, one option is to leave out part III, Analyzing Spatial Data, focusing only on mapping/visualization of spatial data. Another option is to exclude selected chapters from both parts II and III so as to include some spatial analysis. Essential chapters of part 2 are 46 (File Geodatabases, Spatial Data, and Geoprocessing).

Sample syllabus

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Chapter 9, Spatial Analysis, is essential for part 3. You can give in-class demos and short lectures on skipped chapters to provide student awareness of those topics; students can always complete additional chapters on their own as interests or needs dictate. Finally, you can skip the mid-course case study and assign a case study at the end of the course instead of an independent project.

Lectures

PowerPoint slides, Lecture1.pptx through Lecture11.ppt, are provided in the Lectures folder of the Instructor Resources DVD for each chapter on related GIS facts, principles, and guidelines. Please feel free to modify these lectures to meet your individual needs. Following is a sample slide from Lecture3.pptx.

The InstructorGuides folder of the Instructor Resources DVD provides a sample, mid-semester case study for you to use and modify, 3_SampleCaseStudy.docx. Students develop a public transportation GIS by downloading transportation data from the American Community Survey at the US Census website and joining it to GIS layers. Each student selects a US city of interest to him or herself so each case is different. This is a popular case because it allows students to work within a given set of guidelines, yet with a geographic area that interests them.

GIS case study

GIS final project

In the final project, each student is asked to develop his or her own problem statement, obtain data, build a complete GIS, and write an analytical report. The project has two phases, a project proposal submitted by each student and approved by you, with your feedback, followed by student work on the project. The project allows students to focus on an area and issue of interest to them while gaining practical skills on how to obtain data and build their own GIS projects. Its a great capstone for the course, one in which students use a lot of creativity and learn more about GIS while making GIS their own.

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There are three project documents included in the InstructorGuides folder of the Instructor Resources DVD: 4_ProjectStatement.docxProvides objectives, criteria, deliverables, and timeline, and a folder/file structure for projects. 5_WorkingOnGISProjects.docxCovers some project management principles, the project life cycle, GIS project components (project proposal, process log, GIS, and report), and a sample project proposal and report. 6_ProjectGradesheet.xlsxHas grading rubric for the project.

The document 7_DataInstructionsForStudents.docx, included in the InstructorGuides folder of the Instructor Resources DVD, contains instructions for saving GIS Tutorial 1 assignment files. Students must save files in specific folders and initially this can cause much confusion, so you have to place emphasis on whats needed. The map layers and data tables referenced in map documents that students turn in have two sources: (1) files from the EsriPress\GIST1\Data\ folder provided in the GIS Tutorial DVD and (2) files that students create in their assignment folder. Students do not turn in copies of files from the EsriPress\GIST1\Data\ folder. Instead, their map document only points to those files using relative paths. For the relative paths to function, students must save their files in required folders within the folder and file tree of EsriPress\GIST1\. Then you, as instructor, or your teaching assistant, must copy the folder turned in by a student into the correct location of EsriPress\GIST1\ for all to function.

Data instructions for students

At the end of each GIS Tutorial 1 chapter are homework assignments for students to complete and turn in for grading. The solutions for the assignments are not provided on the GIS Tutorial DVD, but are included in the MyAssignmentsSolutions folder of the Instructor Resources DVD. To open the assignments in ArcGIS, you must copy this folder to the \EsriPress\GIST1 folder to yield \EsriPress\GIST\MyAssignmentsSolutions.

Assignment solutions

An Excel grade sheet is provided for each assignment, 1-1 through 11-2 in the Gradesheets folder of the Instructor Resources DVD. These sheets provide objective criteria and assignment points for each criterion for grading. Below is a sample. You or your TA types the score for each criterion and an expression provides the total score. We recommend a short comment if a student misses points of a criterion. Students appreciate that grading is objective to the point of having graded criteria.

Assignment grading rubric