Geography Education

A digital chart used by the minesweeper USS Guardian to navigate Philippine waters misplaced the location of a reef by about eight nautical miles, and may have been a significant factor when the ship drove hard aground on the reef on Jan.

Learn about the high-tech treasure hunting game being played around the world by adventure seekers! Learn more at http://www.geocaching.com Subscribe to this...

Geocaching is great way to get people outdoors, use geospatial technologies and have fun with the whole family. 

Tags: GPS, edtech, geospatial, technology, location.

UNAVCO, a non-profit university-governed consortium, facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy.

"Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research have been using what is typically considered an error in the GPS signal to measure snow depth around GPS receivers. A GPS receiver records both direct and reflected signals from a satellite. A reflected signal bounces off of whatever is around the GPS station before being recorded, and therefore can contain information about the ground surface close to the station.

Traditionally snow depth has been measured by hand. In other words, someone had to go out with a measuring stick to whatever location they were interested in.  GPS snow depth measurements solve both of these problems: once a GPS unit is installed, it can function on its own throughout the winter, and will make a measurement every two hours, which is then averaged for a daily position, or in this case, snow depth."

Tags: GPS, climatechange, water, technology,

For all of its awesome applications, GPS has two fundamental flaws: It doesn't work indoors, and it can't really detect altitude. An Indoor Positioning System would fix that -- and introduce some seriously awesome applications.

Geolocation was listed as one of the important growth industries for the future (it also is a way to reassure students that the their are jobs for geography majors).  The IPS isn't quite here, but it's hard to imagine that is too far away. 

"Thanks to GPS, planes, cars and cellphones can quickly be guided to any destination. The system uses a network of satellites, but how do they relay the correct coordinates from space?  GPS is just a big clock in space. By communicating with four time-keeping satellites, a GPS device can determine it's exact position."

Find the latitude and longitude of a point using Google Maps.

Simple, straightforward and easy to use.  All you do is point and click on the map to get latitude and longitude in both decimal degrees and DMS (degrees, minutes and seconds).  You can also quickly enter coordinates in either format an have the location displayed on the map.

Tags: GPS, mapping, location.

"Now that it is easy to gather tracks and waypoints on a smartphone and map them in a GIS, it provides a good opportunity to remind students about the importance of being critical of and paying attention to data. I recently went on a walk around a local reservoir and used the Motion X GPS app on my iPhone to collect my track and a few waypoints. I emailed the data to myself and added the GPX file to ArcGIS Online so I could map and examine the track. I made my results public and made it visible below to feature some teachable moments......"

What a perfect combination!  Students more and more have these fantastic computing devices that we often underutilize (or ban outright) in their education.  This article shows how to bring GIS and a student's smartphone together.

What if you could use GPS technology to find your misplaced keys? How about if you could use that same technology to lie about where you were in the world or...

We know the common usages of GPS technologies.  As the accuracy of GPS data improves, how does this expand the potenial uses?  What are the ethnics and legalities of GPS tracking devices?  Just like hackers online alter the information with rely on, this video is an introduction to the analogous GPS spoofing technology.  This TED talk is a great exploration of the future of GPS technology and privacy issues. 

In the lush rainforests of Africa's Congo Basin, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people live as hunter gatherers, depending on the forest's natural resources for their survival.

The "Mapping for Rights" program trains people in the Congo to map the land they live on using GPS and other geospatial technologies.  This can assist the to produce documents to politically protect their land from encroachment and preserve their access to the forest.  Globalization can blur many of the modern/traditional narratives as the world becomes interconnected in complex ways.     

A Chinese satellite navigation system began providing services yesterday as the nation seeks to end its “dependence” on the U.S.’s Global Positioning System, or GPS, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China's satellite geolocation system, Beidou, has become operational. It is believed to be accurate to within 10 meters, which beats the U.S. military's GPS (accurate within 20 m). Is this an economic move for China or a way become militarily independent from the U.S.?  How will this change geospatial intelligence?