Aegis 3

A sample lesson to get you going

Aegis 3 is an excellent tool for introducing GIS, and students pick up the functionality of the program very easily. The exemplar tasks provided with the software are excellent, but do require the teacher to spend some time in software demonstration mode. I planned the following lesson with a view to getting students to teach themselves the basics of Aegis 3. I've included the worksheets and an excellent example of pupil work. In subsequent lessons I would expect the majority of students to be fairly confident in using the program. The lesson has been tested with mixed ability pupils from Year 8 to 10, and has been remarkably successful in meeting the objectives.

The lesson materials include a short activity on development indicators. This has been devised for less able students. It may well lead to a discussion about how the indicators could be categorized (social, economic, demographic, health etc) informing the student's subsequent selection of data.

The main activity should be accessible to all students, and experience has shown that it is not necessary to provide a whole class demonstration of Aegis 3 before the embarking on the task. Differentiation is by outcome and the less able may benefit from the writing frame task.
The instructions will need to be tailored to suit the particular network and folder names in use at your school.

Students need to be aware that while the maps provided by Aegis 3 output are cut and pastable, the key isn't. To get round this, I get them to make a screenshot as described in the instructions. It's possible that different networks and operating systems will require other methods to achieve the same result.

Downloadable sheets:

A quick starter activity on development indicators

Using Aegis 3: "Is there a development divide between countries in the North and South?"

Example of student's work [This work is a first draft! Thanks to Nick!]

Links:

Aegis home page with lots of downloadable resources, a free Aegis 3 viewer and a forum.

Mapping Crime. Another of my case studies is written up here at the new Geographical Association web site. The supporting materials are here.

This case study has been devised for the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
Go to the mini-site for the project.