GIS teaching kicks off in 40 secondary schools

SOUTHERN PROVINCE HUYE — Teaching of geographic information systems kicked off this academic year in 40 secondary schools countrywide. Martina Foster, the coordinator of the project, said 2000 students are undertaking the training which is used for visualising, analysing and modelling geographic information on the computer. Talking to The New Times, Martina said, the schools were selected based on factors like the availability of electricity, computers and teachers trained in ICT. “The selected schools are evenly spread out in the country and our plan is to have all secondary schools teaching GIS by the year 2011,” she said, in a telephone interview. The GIS integration in secondary education project is funded by the Ministry of Education as part of its ICT capacity building. It is being implemented by the GIS and Remote Sensing Centre of the National University of Rwanda (CGIS-NUR). The project started with 10 pilot schools in 2007 and it has since been rolled out to 40 schools with about 120 teachers who are trained in the basics of using GIS in the classroom. A GIS textbook for teachers and students has been adapted and published for use within the National Curricula. The project is expected to extend to 160 other schools this year and to formally integrate GIS in a curricular framework allowing teachers to hold teaching lessons in GIS. “GIS teaching is student centred. Students have ‘hands on’ experience in the use of GIS tools in interpreting geographic information like maps,” said Martina. “The broad use of GIS boosts the governments’ efforts towards building an IT literate society as it helps schools to build not only geographic, but also computer knowledge at various levels,” she added. Last year, the CGIS-NUR in collaboration with the Environmental Systems Research Institute and the Ministry of Education, organised a ‘summer camp’ for GIS students at the ET SOS Kinderdorf School in Kinyinya, Kigali. During this camp, pupils went to a study area in Kinyinya to collect geographic coordinates from housings, parcels, water wells and electricity lines with GPS technology and satellite images. They interviewed local people about electricity consumption and water use and analysed their findings on computers. GIS has been widely integrated and used for teaching in Geography and other subjects in countries like Finland, Norway, United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Germany. Ends