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Field course is an important learning activity for students in disciplines like geography and biology. Unfortunately, lack of resources, large student groups, and unprepared students can result in students being passive rather than active during field course preparation. This article reports from a learning intervention where the use of StoryMaps replaced traditional lectures to increase active learning during field course preparation. StoryMaps is a multimedia platform with interactive functionalities, and we assess potential increased learning outcome from a learning intervention based on theories from geographic visualization. Students used StoryMaps to become familiar with the field course site and the field course assignments. As a follow-up, students had to write a reflection note about their thoughts and experiences from using StoryMaps. These notes revealed that students consider StoryMaps as helpful to access information from multiple sources in one visual platform, where they can choose how and what they want to learn, at what time, and in which order. Students also found that complex physical geographical-, and geomorphological principles became more concrete as StoryMaps helped them perceive these principles from multiple angles using pictures, videos, tasks, animations, and graphs. The few critical reflections are mainly related to minor technical issues.

Writing assignments are ubiquitous in higher education. Writing develops not only communication skills, but also higher-level cognitive processes that facilitate deep learning. Cognitive visualizations, such as concept maps, can also be used as part of learning activities including as a form of scaffolding, or to trigger reflection by making conceptual understanding visible at different stages of the learning process. We present Concept Map Miner (CMM), a tool that automatically generates Concept Maps from students' compositions, and discuss its design and implementation, its integration to a writing support environment and its evaluation on a manually annotated corpora of university essays (N=43). Results show that complete CM, with concepts and labeled relationships, are possible and its precision depends the level of summarization (number of concepts) chosen.

In this article, we argue that when complex sociopolitical issues such as ethnocentrism and racial segregation are represented as complex, emergent systems using agent-based computational models (in short agent-based models or ABMs), discourse about these representations can disrupt social studies teacher candidates’ dispositions of teaching social studies without engaging in critical conversations about race and power. Our study extends the literature on agent-based computing to the domain of social studies education, and demonstrates how preservice teachers’ participation in agent-based modeling activities can help them adopt a more critical stance toward designing learning activities for their future classrooms.

Supplement your social studies curriculum with 180 days of daily geography practice! This essential classroom resource provides teachers with weekly geography units that build students' geography knowledge, and are easy to incorporate into the classroom. In a world that is becoming more connected and globalized, 21st century students must have the skills necessary to understand their world and how geography affects them and others. Students will develop their map and spatial skills, learn how to answer text- and photo-dependent questions, and study the 5 themes of geography. Each week covers a particular topic and introduces students to a new place or type of map. The first two weeks consist of a mini-unit that focuses entirely on map skills. For additional units, students will study various places, and how culture and geography are related. With a focus on US states, students will explore various types of maps including physical maps, political maps, topographic maps, thematic maps, climate maps, and various topics including scale, legends, cardinal directions, latitude and longitude, and more. Aligned to state standards and National Geography Standards, this resource includes digital materials.

Purpose This paper aims to showcase and critically review the value of selected pedagogies in which real-world engagements are used to enhance sustainability learning in an open, distance and e-learning (ODeL) context in the Global South. The paper considers opportunities, issues, alternatives and implementation guidelines. Design/methodology/approach The School of Ecological and Human Sustainability (University of South Africa) serves as case study, with blended and fully online learning used as examples of pedagogies. The assessment of these pedagogies uses examples of learning activities and exercises, critical reflections on feedback by lecturers and students and consideration against criteria for real-world learning. Findings The experiences showcased illustrate that despite challenges in ODeL, real-world engagements can be used successful as pedagogy for sustainability learning in the Global South context. Limited access to ICTs can be mitigated through mobile technologies and free and open software applications, as illustrated by the examples in this paper. Research limitations/implications The case study approach and qualitative methodology present limitations, with focus on only two examples. However, significant depth is achieved with the assessment of these examples, while the recommendations and lessons learnt can be applied in other contexts, thus expanding on the knowledge and experience in this field. Originality/value This paper showcases innovative approaches to incorporate real-world engagements for sustainability learning in ODeL. Application of real-world engagements in ODeL in the Global South context is original and addresses the need for teaching and learning strategies responding to the digital divide and contributing to expand access to higher education and an Afrocentric discourse to best practice.

This paper considers the analysis of concept maps utilized as a learning tool in disciplines dealing with immunological responses in two undergraduate Health programs. In total, 48 concept maps were assessed regarding their propositions and structure. The clarity of the propositions was analyzed by using the Propositional Clarity Table and they were classified as adequate propositions (AP) and inadequate propositions (IP). In 48 concept maps, 648 propositions were analyzed in order to determine semantic clarity and conceptual mistakes. Assessments revealed that 69 % of the propositions were classified as adequate and 31 % as inadequate. All the maps analyzed were categorized as showing a network structure. However, when correlating the connections established among the several types of response by the immune system, it was found that despite being structured as a network, only 31.2 % of the concept maps indicated conceptual relationships between the modes of immune response. 27% of the concept maps were made with a high rate of proficiency. Upon the results of our analysis, we realized that there is still a long way in developing the mapping strategy. For us, this low percentage is related to the way undergraduates assimilate the mapping processes. This is a challenge which also reveals limits and weaknesses that may be addressed in future studies. It was noted that results bring into focus that the undergraduates’ learning of concepts associated with the bases of the immunological responses occurred in a meaningful way.

Thermodynamics and electricity are parts of the 10th grade physics curriculum in Romania, but the exciting questions of atmospheric physics and meteorology could be answered if we organize special activities. Linking these topics, educators can create many interesting learning opportunities and try new ways of teaching. This paper is based on a school project and experiment that were used during the last school years in the classroom learning and practical outdoor activities with the Science Club students. The aim of the project is to build a device to measure atmospheric climate variables (e.g. air temperature, air pressure, humidity) and to demonstrate and explain some weather phenomenon. The observations are stored in a database, the data archive and visualization of the data are accessible through a webpage. Students from other schools can get involved in the measurements with their own built devices and can upload their own measurement data to the common database, so we could create a weather map for schools. The whole system is planned as a network of minimeteo stations for students.

The author describes an after-school science club program for urban 4th-grade students that integrated instructional technologies to investigate a pond ecosystem in the local schoolyard. The author conducted a design-based evaluation study to examine the effectiveness of the program in promoting environmental attitudes and understandings of the local watershed. Students used Web-based GIS maps and Google Earth visualizations to understand the geographic nature of their watershed. Results indicate that participation in the long-term pond investigation enhanced environmental attitudes, promoted a sense of environmental stewardship, and fostered responsible environmental behavior.

New approaches to cultural landscape have encouraged a widened range of encounters with the relationship between memory and landscape. At the same time, changing pedagogical approaches moving from an instructional to a learner-centered paradigm have emphasized hands-on, authentic assessment and inquiry-led, project-based learning. In this paper we reflect on two exercises that we have developed in our very different settings to respond to these trends in landscape and learning. In one case, students in a first-year seminar created, shared, analyzed and reflected on childhood landscape maps, engaging multisensory registers of memory and adopting a particularly agential perspective on the exercise and the making of memory. In the second case, an upper-level seminar explored disciplinary traditions and techniques in the context of a hands-on geocaching exercise aimed at everyday memorial making. Together, these exercises suggest the potential for learner-centered pedagogies and a widened range of approaches to memory and landscape to animate our classrooms.

A quantitative method of mapping the web usage of an innovative educational portal is applied to analyze the behaviour of users of the COSMOS Science Education Portal. The COSMOS Portal contains usergenerated resources (that are uploaded by its users). It has been designed to support a science teacher's search, retrieval and access to both, scientific and educational resources. It also aims to introduce in and familiarize teachers with an innovative methodology for designing, expressing and representing educational practices in a commonly understandable way through the use of userfriendly authoring tools that are available through the portal. As a new science education portal that includes user-generated content, the COSMOS Portal encounters the well-known \"new product/service challenge\": to convince the users to use its tools, which facilitate quite fast lesson planning and lesson preparation activities. To respond to this challenge, the COSMOS Portal operators implemented a validation process by analyzing the usage data of the portal in a 10 month time-period. The data analyzed comprised: (a) the temporal evolution of the number of contributors and the amount of content uploaded to the COSMOS Portal; (b) the number of portal visitors (categorized as all-visitors, new-visitors, and returningvisitors) and (c) visitor loyalty parameters (such as pageviews; pages/visit; average time on site; depth of visit; length of visit). The data is augmented with data associated with the usage context (e. g. the time of day when most of the activities in the portal take place). The quantitative results indicate that the exponential growth of the contributors to the COSMOS Portal is followed by an exponential growth of the uploaded content. Furthermore, the web usage statistics demonstrate significant changes in users' behaviour during the period under study, with returning visitors using the COSMOS Portal more frequently, mainly for lesson planning and preparation (in the afternoon hours). The findings demonstrate that the new COSMOS users follow the \"law of surfing\" behaviour, a common pattern of surfing behaviour in portals. However, users return to the COSMOS Portal: returning users comprise more than 50% of all COSMOS visits, stay longer on site and visit more pages. Returning visitors are benchmarked against the \"law of surfing\" and outperform it substantially. These quantitative results benchmark the web usage of a portal and provide its operators with maps of value-added patterns of the portal's offering to its users in the science education community.