CCSF GISEC Website

Welcome faculty & staff!

The GIS Education Center is dedicated to bringing the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to CCSF faculty and staff. GIS is a tool designed to visually communicate data by combining database technologies and effective mapping techniques. This means faculty and staff can benefit from the spatial analysis performed through a GIS.

The GIS Education Center provides:

• Consulting on using, teaching, and implementing GIS in the classroom
• An instructor led GIS Quick Course to learn the GIS basics
• Access to online training
• Comprehensive and powerful GIS software for your office
• Departmental workshops on the benefits and use of GIS
• Access to teaching material

For example, click here to view a table containing voting data from the 2004 presidential election. Notice the table also contains census data about california county demographics. The table is helpful but requires time to analyze the data. However, a GIS can read this table and display the information more rapidly (as shown here) while presenting spatial patterns otherwise masked from the table. In addition, GIS can overlay any of the census variables from the table (population, race, sex...) to facilitate further complex analysis.

Below are methods we believe the faculty and staff can benefit from the use of GIS on campus.

Research
Conduct your own research for class lectures, presentations or your own personal attainment. Bring to life, through maps, the concepts of economies of scale, globalization, or population dispersion. Dislay or animate the chronology of a hurricane, the effects of an earthquake, or rise in crime. GIS presents a unique and powerful visual tool that will enhance your students classroom experience.

Learn to use GIS and spatial statisics to support your own research. From Anthropology to Zoology, GIS provides an important spatial aspect of data that can reveal new patterns or relationships. In addtion, spatial statistics will reinformce the your data and maps. GIS is widely used in academic research and peer-reviewed journals accross multiple disciplines.

In The Classroom
According to the Department of Labor Geospatial Technologies have become one of the fastest growing occupations in the US. The demand for applicants with technical skills in GIS is so great the Department of Labor suggested employers look to technical and community colleges for employees. A goal of the GIS Education Center is to work together with the Earth Science Department and other programs to facilitate course work or projects into the classrom exposing students to GIS. Instructors can use GIS in the classroom to answer demographic, environmental, political and economic issues surrounding San Francisco.

• What is the spatial distribution of ethnicities?
• How did they vote?
• Where are retailers located and what population do they serve?
• Where would be a suitable area to open a business?
• Where are crimes being committed?
• Where is air or ground pollution? Who lives in those areas?

GIS can also provide real-world work experience for students by using Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Class field trips can use GPS units for survey control points. Locate and map structures such as: emergency telephones, historical landmarks, handicap parking, or biological features such as location of marine mammals, human disease, tree species, bird locations, and more.