The Education Committee promotes the exchange of geographic information technology to K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and the public through grants, scholarships, training, and mentoring.  The primary ongoing task of the committee is to administer MAGIP’s grant and scholarship program.

Please send an email to magip.mt+educ@gmail.com if you want to contact the Education Committee chair with questions, comments, ideas, or if you want to join the committee.

News

Students in Bigfork High School's "Projects in GIS" class are receiving college credit at Flathead Valley Community College.  Please see the Bigfork Eagle article on the program for more information.  The school GIS program now has a web page, at http://bhsgis.weebly.com/.

Grants and Scholarships

MAGIP awards K-12 curriculum grants and college scholarships every year.

The 2013 scholarship has been awarded to Dominique David of Montana State University.  She will use a GIS database to record Indigenous science knowledge about the Gallatin Valley headwaters and integrate it with the knowledge of Western Science.  Her research proposal is available here.

The 2013 K-12 grants were awarded to the West Yellowstone K-12 Schools and to C.S. Porter Middle School in Missoula.  Jo Stevens of the West Yellowstone schools will purchase GPS units to use to teach her students the principles of geo-location and create a collection of geocaches in the area that the Chamber of Commerce will advertise for tourists as an enticement to spend time in the area.  Scott Edge of C.S. Porter Middle School will purchase GPS units and use them in a 20-hour geography and geocaching course offered at the school's summer camp for incoming 6th-graders.

The 2012 scholarship was awarded to Mitchell Lee Fyock of the University of Montana.  He will utilize and assess two geomorphological mapping systems developed in Europe for use in high mountain environments in the United States.

The 2012 K-12 curriculum grant was awarded to the Chester-Joplin-Inverness School District to support the use of centimeter-grade GPS by the high school architecture design class taught by Gail Shatkus to lay out building and land designs.

University Scholarships
The University of Montana and Montana State University offer scholarships based on endowment funds that MAGIP contributed to.  For more information, please click on the following links for the MSU Earth Sciences Graduate Scholarship and the UM Zuuring/MAGIP scholarship.

Potential Tasks

The following list of potential tasks and issues was developed at the May 23 meeting and still do not have anyone assigned to work on them. If you are interested in any of these items please select one and volunteer to find out something about it. Let Wendy Largent know at wendy_largent@hotmail.com, so she can update you on the status..

• We need someone to speak at educator's conferences about our grant program.
• The Montana Office of Public Instruction has curriculum standards for many areas, but none of these include GIS. Meet with the OPI Science Curriculum Specialist, to find out what the process is for working GIS into Montana’s Science Curriculum.
• School administrators could be GIS users! ESRI will give them free ArcGIS software. We need someone who can get word out to school administrators on how GIS could help them.
• Find out why we don’t get more scholarship and grant applications. Are the amounts too small? Are we doing everything we should to publicize them?

Committee Meeting Minutes

May 23, 2012

July 12, 2012

October 29, 2012

February 27, 2013