GIS Specialists’ Support for Geography Education - Geography Education in Japan - page 155

15.2 Support Menus by GIS Specialists

A survey was conducted with senior high school teachers regarding barriers to
implementing GIS in class lessons (Fukuda and Tani 2003 ). Teachers noted a lack
of computer facilities, budgets to buy GIS software, in-service teacher training, and
textbooks. Ito ( 2012 ) suggested that GIS could be taught across multiple subjects.
If teaching resources and lessons were shared between teachers, support would be
more accessible. For optimal GIS instruction, Itoh ( 2004 ) described a list of
must-haves: GIS software and websites, and in-service training for GIS learning.

15.3 Choosing and Developing Suitable GIS

Teaching styles, available facilities, and budgets are requirements for determining a
suitable GIS at each school. Table 15.1 summarizes GIS software and functions
already in use in Japanese schools.

15.3.1 Requirements for Suitable GIS

In a linguistics context, the ability to read sentences is a requirement to write them.
The parallel in geography education is that the ability to read maps is the foundation
to edit them. Various types of GIS can be used with map data for visualization and

Table 15.1 Functions, facilities and budgets for each GIS

Software

Functions
Reading GIS map
Topographical map — — —

Town map — — — — — — —

Aerial photo — — — — — —

Editing GIS map
Editing GIS data — — — — — —

Editing photo — — —

Statistic map — — — — — —

Elevation map — — — — —

Facilities
Offl ine use — — — — —

Budgets
Free — — — — — —