Cesga

 0 vote(s)

Monday 24/10/2016 13:56

CESGA develops an app and a geoportal to learn about nature at school within EU project "PhenoloGIT", led by Plymouth University.

Supercomputing Centre of Galicia has developed a set of innovative tools for easy use of geographic information technologies in school to analyze and learn about the changes in nature.

On 27 and 28 October the European consortium of PhenoloGIT educational project "Spatial data Analysis and mobile learning in school," will meet, and the first operational version of the tools developed European partners will be presented. In this project, education and technologies specialists as well as 16 primary and secondary four European countries (Spain, UK, Lithuania and Denmark) analyze the possibilities of using visualization tools and analysis of geographic information systems (GIT) in the primary and secondary classroom. For this, CESGA has developed two multilingual tools: an app for use on mobile or tablets (available for Android and IOS) that students and teachers can use to gather information (photos, videos, text, and climate data) of their natural environment as well as a geoportal to display the data collected when working in their classroom, filter data by different criteria, so they can perform different analyzes (by species, countries, time, phenomenon to observe, etc.).

In the next months, participant teachers will learn, test and propose improvements to these tools, and then they will develop proposals for activities to work with their students, according to their national curriculum and educational contexts. Next spring educational these proposals and tools will be experienced by European students, who can not only collect and analyze information on animals and plants in their environment, but contrast it with that of their European colleagues species, since the app has a social component that allows them to interact with the contributions of other participants.

The reduced number of piloting schools, limited in this first pilot phase, will be expanded to allow other schools to join the project.  Also, for this later phase, CESGA will build an online learning open space to share and disseminate proposals and GIT tools created in the project for all interested schools.

For more information about the project, you can visit: www.phenologit.org, our social spaces in Facebook and Twitter, or by contacting Maria R Malmierca at CESGA e-learning@cesga.es