Since 2017, the CGA has enjoyed an excellent partnership with Dr. Katsuhiko Oda of the Spatial Sciences Institute at University of Southern California.  Dr. Oda has been successful is securing funds to support research on the effectiveness of professional development focused on geospatial technology, and this creates opportunities to provide high quality professional development to California’s teachers.  CGA’s experience providing PD matches perfectly with Dr. Oda’s research and teaching interests.  Work carried out during the 2017-18 school year was presented at the GIS-Pro / CalGIS Conference in Fall 2018.  This year, a grant from Esri, the world’s leading provider of GIS software, provided support for further work.

In July 2019, two 3-day workshops were held – one at USC and one at SDSU.   Teachers from a variety of grade levels and subject areas attended and learned about using ArcGIS Online in their instruction.   They explored GeoInquiries and learned to customize the inquiries as well as the maps.  They learned to collect their own data using Survey123 and to integrate is with other data in a web map, and they learned to create StoryMaps using the latest template released by Esri just this summer.  They also got advice from teachers Stu Woodward and Nickte Mendez, participants in the 2018 workshops who shared their experiences teaching with geospatial technology.  A total of 27 educators attended the workshops, with 25 earning certificated of completion after participating in all 3 days’ instruction.  The CGA would like to thank Dr. Oda as well as Sheryl Hasegawa (awesome volunteer  who coordinated workshops), teachers Stu Woodward and Nickte Mendez, Julie Goldsworth (CSU Fullerton grad student and volunteer tutor for SDSU workshop),  and Angel Yin and Alex Muñoz (USC students and volunteer tutors for USC workshop).