By Herschel Sarnoff

At Jordan High School, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, we have begun a program of incorporating Arcview 3.1 into several phases of our Social Studies Curriculum. We hope to expand this program into science and math classes starting in the fall 1999 semester.

The major impetus for incorporating GIS in a High School setting came about as a result of a class I attended, along with 24 other teachers, at Los Angeles Trade Tech college in the summer of 1998. I had never even heard the term GIS before attending the class let alone the potential it holds for transforming education.

The class was organized and taught by Michael Rendler under the auspices of Workforce LA who provided the major funding. All I knew about the course was that it involved computers and sophisticated mapping software. As an added bonus the teacher participants were paid their normal hourly rate to attend the six-week course.

I have been involved with computer based education since the early 1980’s beginning with Apple II’s and progressing to a complete Apple IIc by the middle of the decade. Beginning in 1995 I began replacing the Apples with Pentiums based computers and today have a networked lab of 16 Pentium 166’s and 8 Pentium II 333’s. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be so well equipped. My good fortune is in part a result of my High School being a low-income inner city institution with access to Federal Chapter I funds. Almost none of my equipment came from school district funding sources.

Most of my work has been disk or CD based since we have yet to have an Internet connection installed. Occasionally, over the years, I have run a social studies computer lab for all the teachers in my department but the bulk of computer time has been used for the students in my classes. Our school has several other computer labs and is adding, thanks to the California Digital High School program, additional ones. My experience and equipment has made the transition to using Arcview relatively painless.

On the second day of the summer course the power of GIS struck me. I informed the instructor that I was extremely interested in pursuing GIS. He graciously aided me by installing Arcview on my home computer and spending time tutoring me. The class went on to other programs such as Microstation and 3d rendering software but I decided to devote my time to Arcview.

We ordered the Arcview Schools and Libraries Program and I had it installed by the time school began. My greatest concern was teaching the program to my students who are all minorities (Black and Hispanic) with very low standardized test scores. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only did the students comprehend the program but several excelled and wanted additional instruction. We now have five students attending a Saturday GIS class at Trade Tech College that runs from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Teaching Arcview, while educationally sound, is not in the Social Studies curriculum (with the exception, of course, being Geography). This had led me to work on lessons that directly support the standard High School Curriculum such as World and US History, Government and Economics. Even a cursory glance at the GIS data available reveals the powerful potential for using GIS in all Social Studies classes. It will take a massive and time-consuming effort to produce these lessons but the payoff wills more then makeup for the expenditure.

The main problem I am having is finding the time to write the curriculum while maintaining a full teaching schedule. Unlike our colleagues in colleges and universities K-12 teachers are given almost no time to create innovative lessons or meet with their peers to discuss learning strategies. We are fortunate at Jordan High School to have a small group of teachers who are willing to give of their own time to bring technology education to our students.

This is the first year we have tried incorporating GIS into our High School. The results have been extremely positive. We have extensive plans to expand GIS education into future years we an eager and hardworking group of students and teachers.

Herschel Sarnoff hersche3@ix.netcom.com