Typical One Day Teacher Workshop

North Carolina teachers went to the classroom in October to learn hands-on computer tools to help them teach about the environment. Twelve teachers from six central North Carolina schools participated in a day-long GIS/CITYgreen workshop at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte's campus. The event was facilitated by Lyn Malone, coauthor of Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators.

• Introduction to GIS and CITYgreen
• Prepare map for field inventory

Using the lesson plans as a guide, teachers learned how to create landcover data by digitally drawing the trees of their study site from a digital aerial photo base map of an area on the campus. The result was a map detailing the location of all the trees in the area of interest.

• Conduct tree survey

Next, the teachers headed outside to perform a tree inventory. They learned proper techniques for identifying trees, calculating height and trunk diameter, and determining tree health and growing conditions.

• Analyze the collected data using CITYgreen

The collected field data was then entered into the tree's attribute table and the CITYgreen software was used to run models that calculated the trees' ecological and economic benefits. Using CITYgreen's growth model, teachers virtually "grew" the trees over a 25-year period to investigate their long-term benefits.

Teachers left with a resource kit to help them implement the lesson plans in their classrooms. The kit included the following materials:

• Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators
• One year site license for ArcView 3
• CITYgreen Software
• American Forests' environmental education lesson plans
• 50-meter tape measure
• Tangent height gauge for measuring tree height
• Digital aerial photos for each school's campus
• Membership to American Forests

Click here to view a sample workshop agenda

Contact Mike Lehman for details