Ian Lockwood

This year I have been implementing a program to incorporate GIS skills in my geography classes here at the Overseas School of Colombo. It started with an intriguing presentation by David Brian of the Chinese International School during a DP Geography workshop in 2007. I was hooked and returned with ideas that were woven into a proposal. This took a while to get approved but last year the school invested in ESRI’s Arcview 9.3 platform. In the last few months my students in the grade 10 and 11 Geography classes have  completed dynamic projects using Arcview 9.3. I am learning on the go with them and it has been an exciting educational adventure. I made the posters (above and below) for GIS Day, which we celebrated with great fanfare on November 18^th 2009.

Soon after Grade 10 did an extensive study of the nearby Talangama wetlands to look at landuse patterns in this growing eastern suburb of Colombo. We were fortunate to get excellent baseline data from the Urban Development Authority’s GIS lab, which is located in neighboring Battaramulla. We did two class visits to Talangama using a GPS, cameras and simple field notes to gather information. Later the students compiled the findings using the UDA data with ArcMap. This was turned into a landuse map and incorporated into a small A3 poster using Adobe’s InDesign (a great program, but one that took a while to get the students used to). These are some of the student posters:

Talangama landuse posters created by the Grade 10 OSC Geography class