Hi everybody, Rob here, back with blog post 2 for the week of 6/6-6/13!
Monday: This week, we were laying a lot of the groundwork for the internship in the coming weeks. Starting out at 12:15pm ET, I had a quick turnaround check in meeting with my teammate Susan Hoskins to go over some of the resources for the many seminars and webinars they had recommended I get some familiarity with in the week prior. We finalized my academic schedule with respect to my working schedule for my internship (which actually starts on the 21st, to my surprise), and took the time to cover some of the core resources that I’ll be leaning on this summer as I work to educate youth. Most of these core resources provided an outline for curricula in GIS and how to design courses for classes with youth. It was very reminiscent to me of the learning outcomes that I would receive at the start of my classes in university in my syllabus. Then it suddenly clicked that this was pretty much exactly what these outlines were. Its actually mind blowing seeing how much stuff is going on behind the scenes for stuff like this that I take for granted from the student side of things! In addition to going over the resources and familiarizing myself with them, I was also tasked with drafting up a GIS survey for the Career Explorations presenter Alexa Maille (from last week), more on this later.
Tuesday: This was the day that things really started to heat up. I had the first of my several meetings at 11:00pm, which doesn’t seem so bad, until one realizes that it was 11:00pm Eastern Time, and I’m currently working on my internship over in California! SO, in typical Summer fashion, I got myself up at about 7:15AM to make breakfast, and attended my first PYD (Positive-Youth-Development) meeting, there the presented spoke about some of the core components and factors that are involved in how youth develop, as well as some strategies that might be employed to effectively facilitate the growth of our students and youth in a day to day environment. I found the meeting very interesting, however I very much felt like I was a fish out of water, I still feel like I’m a youth myself instead of an educator, so it was all super new to hear about how educators that were around the country were all learning about how to approach teaching, and the things to keep in mind. I think the most interesting thing to hear about was Maslow’s pyramid of needs, which stated that before one can begin to focus on their development, there are other factors that need to be considered and taken care of first, such as food, shelter, and a good home-life. For me, I found it very profound how preoccupied the speaker and other teachers were with this topic in particular and made me realize the lengths that these people will go for their students to help them learn, from reaching out to charity organizations, and fighting for these kids to make sure that they have financial support, it was awesome to see the beautiful, caring nature of these educators really coming out in the meeting.
After this meeting, I hopped onto my first session of GeoEd ’21, the software training webinar series for ArcGIS.
I ended up going to the Living Atlas session, which was really awesome for a few things: firstly, I had been doing mini tutorials prior to the webinar, and so it was useful in being able to take my comfort with the software to the next level and try it on something new, (Living Atlas vs. Map Viewer), secondly, I got to see just how much stuff you can really do with mapping software! We got to look at several example applets that all used the Living Atlas, and each provided interesting visual respresentations of different type of information, such as changes of locations in the US through the last 20 years, wildfire representations, drought histories by County, COVID 19 trends, even US vessel shipping lanes! (this one was the most aesthetically pleasing to me, even though it crashed my computer a few times).
Wednesday: Today was the second round of training webinars in GeoEd, and on this day I decided to attend one on Experience Builder. So, Experience Builder was very awesome in the overall scheme of ArcGIS’ apps because it incorporates several of the other apps in order to create large, integrated webpages and apps (called ‘Experiences’) that can be viewed on the laptop, tablet, or phone. To me it seemed extremely powerful, because the approach was very simple, yet you could use the simplicity of implementing the different apps as widgets to create very complex webpages that have loads of information. I will admit I was a little bit tired on this day getting used to the schedule of meetings, however I prevailed and picked up a few new tricks along the way, such as syncing multiple widgets together, so that when you interact with one, (for example, clicking a county to see its region highlighted), the data that you might have decided to put on a separate widget will get filtered alongside the selection you make. Its like creating this big web of data all over the place, so cool!
Thursday: I started with my check in with my teammates Susan Hoskins and Kat Leo (she was new for me and really nice), unfortunately Kelly was busy at some of the GeoEd conferences but hey, that’s alright. So, for context, the day prior, I had ran into some issues with drafting the survey, since it turned out that I had needed permissions to be eligible to create survey through Survey123. It turned out the following morning (this thursday) I finally had the permissions to get started, and what better time to get started than with my internship supervisors, right? Anyways, we essentially used the short check in time to get the rough draft of the survey together, and then had to sign off because right after our meeting, we had PYD meeting 2!
This webinar was getting deeper into some of the prior topics on youth development, and in this specific meeting, the major topic of discussion was all about ‘sparks’ which others (such as yourself) might better understand as a ‘passion’. When trying to understand how we, as teachers, might learn to help youth to develop their own sparks, the speaker really emphasized the power in being able to help youth gain a spark by encouraging doing things, and how development of self-sufficiency and mastery are some of the best ways by which youth develop individually into more resilient and confident individuals. I personally resonated with this strongly in regards to one of the hobbies that I picked up during College and do quite a lot of (and have been slacking on as of recently), which is music production. Over the last few years trying to learn the software for music production, I had to find out (and am still finding out) lots of tricks, and as I’ve progressed I’ve gained a sense of personal ownership over the whole process of writing and making music and that has been a very positive and empowering thing for myself.
To cap off the slew of meetings on this particular day, I attended the ArgGIS Insights meeting, which was a pretty interesting app on the ArcGIS catalogue which initially had some skepticisim about. This was mainly due to its similarities with another app in ArcGIS, which is called Dashboards, and does much of the same thing. In the case of Insights however, it was almost like it was a blend between Dashboards and Experience Builder. It had a very close similarity to that of Experience Builder in how things were laid out and it gave it a very intuitive approach to how one might lay out and design their Insights page on a given topic. However, something I had noticed was that it seemed a little bit less powerful of an analytical tool than I was hoping for; I was playing around with a small data set that I was using as practice and in some of the cases it just didn’t seem as customizable as I had hoped for and didn’t have some of the features that I had found pretty useful in the case of some of the other apps. While it is also hard to make a judgement based off the smaller data set I was using, I still will make judgements as someone using their software!
Friday: With all my meetings for the week basically summed up, for the Friday I was putting some finishing touches on the survey, and trying to figure out how to link the survey-taker’s responses to a map that would then be presented in the Career Ex meeting, however I ran into some sharing problems, so I was sending a lot of emails with my team to figure out what was going on. We’re getting closer to the start however, and it’s really exciting! I can’t wait to see what this internship is really all about!