Finals Season

Today is my last intern day for the semester. I will continue my internship through the summer on other projects, but this is the last High School Outreach day. This has been a most challenging assignment. We have had 20+ students in each class, showing them all the different resources we can squeeze into 45 minutes. (32 in the last class of the day!)
We start out with Episode 1 of the Penn State Geospatial Revolution Videos. This is like a hook in the lip of a wide mouth bass. I love looking at their faces as they watch the movie. A fast pace depiction of all the technology at their finger tips today and the things to come in the near future.
  We have a list of map apps that they can use on the computer:
:http://nationalmap.gov/ , http://www.openstreetmap.org/ and my personal favorite: http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/california/.
In the national map they can learn to create maps for reports. In the Open Street Map they can add to an online resource for others and in the wildlife crossing map they are able to help conservation services to map the habitats of migration that is effected by people traffic.
   These are the kids that we worked with on Wednesday using GPS units with a Geo-caching set up in a lot near their school. We bring up Google Earth and show them the points they were searching for on Wednesday. I hope through this exposure they will engage their parent this summer and  do something different on the internet. It is an amazing opportunity to reach kids with positive tools they can use in the future.
   I am not sure where the Lord is taking me in the GIS world. I just want to take every opportunity available. Today a Linked-In article stated that: projects are the new job interview.
We had 4 great projects that we presented to the RAGU meeting Wednesday night. I hope they will be featured on the Shasta College GIS Facebook Page. RAGU is the Redding Area GIS Users. Once a year they meet at the college to see the student projects. We had one group that created an App for wild flowers and trees along the Sacramento River Trail. Another group mapped all the fire hydrants in a rural area of North West Redding for Cal Fire. The third group worked with the College physical plant folks and updated the maps for use in maintaining the 1500+ trees on campus. In the process they also made a nature trail guided tour of special trees on campus. My group had Rick Bonetti of http://reddingvoice.com/ as our client. He wanted a handheld, fold-able map to give homeless people at the Project Homeless Connect  this next Tuesday. My teammates did an excellent job putting together what Rick wanted. The information from all of our maps will also go into the database for ESRI ArcGIS server.

Tomorrow my daughter Johanna will be Graduating from High School. She earned the diploma in December and actually took 20 Shasta College units this semester. I am very proud of her accomplishment. She is an amazing young woman.

 A photographer, a ballerina, an honor student, and a Godly woman in a very cute package.

Shalom,
GIS εїз