FOSS4G EU Como 2015 BOF2

FOSS4G Europe in Como, July 17, 2015 Summary notes for GeoForAll school education BOF

Participants: [1]

The meeting started at noon and we had about an hour to brainstorm about activites of GeoForAll initiative in the context of school education.

'GENERAL ISSUES

• 'Schools' mean children and youth aged 2-19
• We prefer to talk about open science, resources and education rather than focus strictly on FOSS4G - more appropriate appoach for school education
• Short survey/questionnaire need to be taken among existing labs to find out who's interested in school education (initial inventory of people interested in a topic)
• All educational materials dedicated for teachers will be gathered in general repository but flagged somehow to make them visible (relation to general talk about changes in repository)

1. LABS AT SCHOOLS

• A Lab can be organized at school (primary or secondary) as long as it fulfills the criteria of the network membership.
• We won't put special attention on getting schools involved as labs - in most cases they will be "partners" of existing labs taking advantage of their experience and knowledge.

2. GEOFORALL THEMATIC GROUP

• Wikipage of this group (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_TeacherTraining_SchoolEducation) should be updated (Urban Science as an example) - Ela will take care of this.
• We need "clean" website (no wikistyle, sorry ;-) as part of GeoForAll main website to "catch" educators - Phil declared to take care of this (in collaboration with Suchith and Jason)

3. NEXT STEPS

• Connecting with existing education networks i.e.

- network of digital-earth.eu Centres of Excellence (http://www.digital-earth-edu.net/) - Nikos Labrinos working with primary teachers as a great example of CoE (Hellenic Centre of Excellence); - School on the Cloud effort (www.schoolonthecloud.eu);

• Creating educator opportunity across the globe at each FOSS4G, ISPRS, ICA events (EU, NA, Asia, SA, etc).

- The next FOSS4G NA may occur in Raleigh North Carolina in spring 2016. In this example, we encourage Phillip and Charlie to work with Helena to organize such a training workshop and perhaps other events. - For FOSS4G 2016 Bonn, Ela will organize such an event (dedicated panel session, seperate track (?). We need to begin planning now since these are 6-12 months away now. - Phil's comment: "In order to expand FOSS into K-12 and colleges, we ask local G4A affiliate labs work towards organizing a teacher training workshop during an event near you for teachers & educators from local schools and universities." - need to check if there's any lab in Bonn or Raleigh

• Gathering partners around GeoForAll school initiative

- companies/private partners such as GISetc (Phil?) - associations such as NCGE in America

• Would like to add GeoForAll Global Educator of the Year Award in school category - maybe connect events such as Bonn conference with some competition for teachers (show to transfer your school work from commercial GIS into FOSS4G) + find sponsors to make some group attend the event

Each lab should look for this opportunities in its own local environment. Suchith's comment: "We need to move this locally to benefit local education needs and requirements."

Thanks all participants for great discussion! Feel free to comment and add missing issues.

Ela