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Questions such as

"What part of my town is most likely to flood when heavy rainfall occurs?"
"Where should we build a new school to serve the increasing population in our town?
"What types of soil and rock underlie our community and how does it impact our community plan?"

are the kinds of questions one may ask of your students when trying to do open-ended, project-based inquiry. New tools, generally called "GIS software tools" have emerged that are designed to facilitate student investigations of these kinds of questions. The questions may be of a local (as illustrated above) or of a national or global nature. For example, real-time earthquake patterns may be investigated using GIS software.

A major "force" in the GIS world is Environmental Research Systems Institute (ESRI), located at www.esri.com. ESRI makes several tools that can be used by educators to study GIS in the classroom. These include ArcView and ArcVoyager. Most of the ready-to-implement lessons found within this website are written with instructions best followed in ArcView or ArcVoyager. ESRI also happens to be a strong supporter of K12 education.

ArcVoyager is a free tool provided by ESRI. It provides a great interface designed to introduce the novice user to GIS software. It has only one major limitation-that is, you can not save any project that you create. ArcVoyager is available for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms and can be downloaded via the web. Click here to order free ArcVoyager Special Edition CD. You may need Instruction Manual in Tech Tips for detailed instruction on how to install ArcVoyager on your own computer. For your convenience, we also provide ArcVoyager download. The assignments and lessons we are using, require that the users have the lessons and data that are on the CD in addition to the arcvoyager software.

ArcView 3.x is an "industrial strength" software tool that is used by community planners, environmental researchers, law enforcement professionals as well as in many other areas of society.

ArcView 3.x for windows can be licensed at a very reasonable cost for an entire school site. For more information on obtaining ArcView for windows, click here.

Other GIS tools exist, one of which was developed at Northwestern University and is called My World.

We have provided additional tools here to help you "unzip" the files you download from this page to read the guide and "read me" files that come with the software. These files are generally in "pdf" format, which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to open. Get free Stuffit for Mac and Download WinZip for PC.