The purpose of this article is to introduce two easy-to-use analytical tools--OPTIC (Overview; Parts; Title; Interrelationships; and Conclusion) and SCRAP (Spatial-Temporal; Conditions, Connections, or Comparisons; Region; Aura, Association, or Analog; Pattern or Exceptions)--that can help teachers guide student learning with maps and photos.…

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children's and young people's everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training…

The Baltimore Mural Project (BMP) seeks to connect religious studies education to the growing literature on threshold concepts in order to address bottleneck areas in student learning. The project is designed for undergraduate service courses comprised of mostly non-majors: for example, world religions. Students in these courses often struggle to…

Google Earth has made a wealth of aerial imagery available online at no cost to users. We examine some of the potential uses of that data in illustrating basic physics and astronomy, such as finding the local magnetic declination, using landmarks such as the Washington Monument and Luxor Obelisk as gnomons, and showing how airport runways get…

Michael Wood and others have recently drawn attention to the ways in which big stories can be told through local histories. Hughes and De Silva report a teaching unit through which they aimed to help Year 7 pupils make history come alive by exploring the history of a local street and the people who lived in it using census materials, the physical…

In this article, the authors explore the timely and sometimes controversial topic of gay civil rights and how the attendant issues might be taught in the social studies classroom. Many teachers shy away from teaching students about gay rights issues for a variety of reasons including personal beliefs, a lack of instructional time as a result of…

Almost eighty years ago, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of Bank Street College of Education in New York City, wrote about social studies in ways that sound remarkably contemporary: "In the first place, we shall say that the curriculum should continue the laboratory methods, which means it should furnish the children with as many first-hand…

Community mapping is a promising practice that can assist early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) professionals uncover the depth and diversity of community needs, resources, and learning opportunities, in the neighborhoods surrounding their schools. Community mapping is an inquiry-based method that situates learning in the…

In the social studies of science, visuals and graphical representations are theorized by means of the concept of inscription, a term that denotes all representations other than text inscribed in some medium including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations. Inscriptions constitute an intrinsic and integral part of scientific practice; their…

Aerial imagery has a great capacity to engage and maintain student interest while providing a contextual setting to strengthen their ability to reason proportionally. Free, on-demand, high-resolution, large-scale aerial photography provides both a bird's eye view of the world and a new perspective on one's own community. This article presents an…

Three-dimensional mind maps are a highly effective tool for providing engaging, kinaesthetic and sensory experiences for young children, with real objects used to promote the sharing of knowledge and the creation of connections. The use of real objects allows children the opportunity to connect with those objects at a personal level, thus placing…

NASA is involved in a project involving the International Space Station (ISS) and an Earth-focused camera called EarthKam, where schools, and ultimately students, are allowed to remotely program the EarthKAM to take images. Here the author describes how EarthKam was used to help middle school students learn about biomes and develop their…

This article will demonstrate an approach for discovering and assessing local landscape change through the use of remotely sensed images. A brief introduction to remotely sensed imagery is followed by a discussion of relevant ways to introduce this technology into the college science classroom. The Map Detective activity demonstrates the…

"The Geography Teacher" provides hands-on reference and educative material for K-12 Geography teachers. The journal also pioneers innovative ideas for contemporary teaching methods, including lesson plans. This issue contains the following: (1) Census in Schools Program (census.gov); (2) Ask Dr. de Blij (Dr. Harm de Blij); (3) Eritrea:…

"Back to the Basics" is an innovation of the WETMAAP Program (Wetland Education Through Maps and Aerial Photography) which offers a series of workshops that provide training in basics ecological concepts, technological skills, and methods of interpretation necessary for assessing geography and earth science topics. The precept of the…