capture. watch tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and watch american history tv every weekend on c-span3. ♪♪ from the 2020 national council for history education conference, albemarle high school teacher chris bunin shows how geographic information systems or gis can be used to trace the source and map the spreads of diseases throughout history including cholera, smallpox, and aids. he co-authored "jamestown to

appomattox: mapping u.s. history with gis." >> i'm so excited to be here with you. i'm joining you from nelson county, virginia, just outside albemarle county. this is my school campus where i teach geography, world history, and geospatial technologies. the high school is a literal stone's throw away from the border of charlottesville, virginia. if you would like to follow along today with some of the links i'm going to be sharing today, if you go to bit.ly, it is not a perfect alignment to this keynote, i had all the intentions to have it line up perfectly but my children running around upstairs had different ideas. hopefully you'll get a chance to interact with some of the maps i'm going to share with you today. when i was asked to give this keynote i thought about, let's see, i wonder, everybody in this audience will know what gis is, and i quickly concluded you

might not. so part 1 will be a crash course on gis and the power of the geographic inquiry model. 2, we will look at how we can use gis and geographic inquiry to teach medical geography historically and contemporarily. we'll then discuss how can you use gis to support your students and your communities moving forward from this moment. and then if there are any questions from the audience. so when i think of gis and the power of geography, i think of the power of maps. the first time we had a conversation on using gis in the history classroom, dr. david bowdenheimer made a speech or a presentation. he started off right away with every event has both a temporal and spatial tag. then he talked about how we emphasize the temporal in chronology and history. he said so often when teaching

history, we usually know when something happened with a high degree of certainty. we have often less precise knowledge of where it happened. that's where the power of maps come in to understanding intersections of time, space, and place. the images above, on the top of this powerpoint, share with you trenches in vietnam. i had the benefit to travel with the national humanities center there a few years ago. and if i just showed my students the pictures of the trenches, they might go, they look like the trenches from the western front, which would make sense because vietnam was french indo-china at the time and they carried a lot of their military strategies with them. however, while we were there, i pulled out my gps unit and happened to capture a picture, i said, this is too cool, i got to get a picture of this. when i came back to my classroom and started sharing this experience, the picture didn't

raise the questions. the map raised the questions and the curiosity. my students started to ask me, where were you? why were you there? why is that point significant? and so to speak to the significance of this point, it is where french indo-china fell to vietnam in 1954. if you study modern u.s. history or world history, you know the ripple effects of this fall. while we were there with the national humanities center, we went into the same site, where if you go there now they commemorate this place as if you were visiting the fall of yorktown and cornwall's surrender in the american revolution. we were there to use geospatial technologies to develop global apps and enhance the ability for people to travel to these places and have a better experience. it just so happens we got there and there were a group of students in ninth or tenth

grade, they were using geospatial technologies and mobile apps to interview visitors about their experience. they hovered around us, they were asking questions. in the background question, you'll see listening in dr. christian lantz from university of north carolina chapel hill. they said, can we take a picture of you? okay. next thing you know, i'm on snapchat. they're sending a picture out and i'm realizing, this is why this technology matters, this is why it's relevant to our students. there are going to be some phrases to think about today. and i'm going to give some credit to the folks who shared them with me because you don't teach on an island, right? if you do, you're going to not do so well. you have friends that help you get there. when we talk about using maps to teach things, we use it to improve the signal and reduce the noise. it's courtesy of paul

rittenhouse, a colleague of mine who teaches with me with the james madison university, they sponsor a class in my high school. layers make maps, maps make apps. that one is courtesy of georgianne rebar. it's a great way to think about how these maps work. and then lastly, and it's a quote that was shared with me nearly ten years ago by one of our fellow ncac board members, culture is the history we inherit. so let's start out with what is gis. it's an abbreviation. the "g" stands for geography, geographic. that's the map, that's the visual we often see when we look at maps or at interactive maps. information stands for a table of data. it can be an excel spreadsheet, it can be a google sheet. if you're familiar with excel,

you're one-third of the way to doing gis. if you can read a map, you're two-thirds of the way to doing gis. the system is how the data and the map interact. if you can click on your computer buttons, you can now do gis. that's the three pieces that make a gis work. another powerful element to gis maps is we can layer information. that's the idea of how do we improve the signal and reduce the noise when we look at things. many maps we use in classrooms and to tell stories are very messy. the nice thing about gis maps is that we can separate the map features out into separate layers and choose what we see and what we don't see. that helps comprehension and communication. we see these maps in our everyday lives. they're ubiquitous. these are my directions i was supposed to take this past wednesday and head up to cleveland.

when we wake up in the morning we often check out what's our weather going to be like. and they're using gis to share with us that information. the maps i'm showing you so far were professionally-made maps. but students can make these maps. this is a map a student of mine made, in the heat of political season, primaries, soon we'll have elections, for his government class project he was figuring out, creating a campaign project for elizabeth warren, using gis to help make the pitch as to why she should go campaign in virginia, where would be the swing spots. he's using gis to show the relationship between level of education and the way in which people tend to vote in virginia. they're used by our communities to help make decisions and inform us on making our governments more efficient. this is a heat map that the city of raleigh made to track in lifetime where trash are. people fill out an app to say,

i'm standing here, i would like to tell you where the garbage is. they take this heat map to make decisions as to where we should do street sweeping today. as you can see, it makes it more efficient. there are certain areas they won't go to every day. this is the map that gets most attention in my gis class. there's a gis professional who started out working in environmental gis, then he started mapping nba shots. and he has now been an nba executive, he's worked for espn. he's using the same technology of this map. but rather than showing trash, she's showing where did lebron james make or miss that shot and how can we make decisions based on that. so the idea that i'm sharing with you is the technology we're going to talk about to map diseases, we're using to map so many other everyday elements in our lives. one of my favorite examples, just before we kick into really using gis, is how creative students can be with this. similar technique that we saw

with the trash and the nba maps. students started to fill out a twitter feed and say, i saw him here, i saw him there. she created a heat map to say, hey, during the day here is where you can find the hall monitor, here is where you can't find the home monitor. kelsey, who just became a gis professional this past december, she graduated from college, she wanted to make sure students saw the disclaimer that this does not encourage you skipping school. in addition, she initially started with wanting to map out trash so we have a really clean school. so she had to go to the hall monitor assignment. what i'm wanting to show you here, this technology is being used by meteorologists and government agencies, used by high school kids to figure out where the hall monitor is. to teach you about the power of gis, i want to look at this historic event right here.

the fate of the "titanic." if you were at the bit.ly site, i'll go there myself here. i'm going to be toggling back and forth. do not judge me by my screen, although i think you already have. all right. so the bit.ly site, you'll see there's a link to a "titanic" table. you click on that and open it up. it's going to bring you to a 47-page list of all the passengers that were on the "titanic." the heart of gis is location. if we were doing this in a workshop, i would say, hey, why don't you scroll through these 47 pages and share with me any spatial or social patterns you notice on the map. as you worked through, you would notice there are a lot of people in first class. initially there were a lot of people from montreal and new

york. you would start to ask me questions about what's the difference in a blue row versus a white row. white rows either have a body number or no body number, that means people were missing. blue means they survived. you have to realize, this is the table, this is the "i" in gis. and so we could take this, and we have some locations that we can map. if we have locations, we can map them. we have where they're from, where they boarded, where they were heading. so the team of ezri working with our gis online took this list from wikipedia and said let's make a map and see if we can improve the signal and reduce the noise. if you look on the bit.ly site, you'll see the second link is the fate of the "titanic" link. this is that data mapped. 47 pages. but i want you to notice, as i work with this, how much more

interactive and powerful the story is because it is mapped. we can filter the distribution of passengers from first class to second class to third class. i can zoom in on a map. i can even say, i wonder what was going on in ireland. i can go through that pattern again and go from third class to second class to first class. and we notice there was one passenger from dublin, ireland, mr. edward collin. it shows you his location and his information that is sitting right here in the table. so that is gis and the power of gis. so what i want to share with you, when we're talking about gis maps, we're linking maps to tables. also driving a lot of the maps

we make and we look at in our schools, we're following an inquiry process. this is the geographic inquiry process. it's a scientific inquiry process. at the end of the day, it's the inquiry process. asking questions, acquiring resources, exploring data, analyzing that information, then acting on that, whether you make a map, a movie, and so forth. the heart of this for me in historical geography are the questions of where, why there, and why should we care. if you embark in using gis in the classroom, you'll need to think about, what's your purpose? are you teaching with gis, using it to enhance your instruction and improving your presentations, your classwork assignments? or are you teaching gis, you can strike a balance, but there are two different things. the image at the bottom right is a student of mine creating an equity map, looking at affordable housing, a nonprofit

needed a map, they reached out to me and my student had a service opportunity. now we want to move into gis and epidemiology and look at what's possibly considered the first true gis. and so if you would like to interact with me with this map, click on the power of data link in the bit.ly site. this is a map produced by john snow who was a journalist in london during the cholera outbreak of 1854. he was trying to figure out why are so many people getting sick. so the link takes you to this gis, mapping cholera activity. we'll share the links with you at the end. it's a great site to go to to

learn how to use gis in the classroom or on your own, from an armchair gis professional. click on the link here that opens up the map. you may get a warning that says, hey, can't load the john snow base map. ignore that. click okay, we're cool. now, if you click on this little icon just below "details," this little blue square, it says it shows you the contents of the map. i love it when i start to do historical gis maps because students will ask me questions. one student asked me, mr. bunin, what does soho mean? i'm like, i don't know. i always have a fact checker in my room, it's similar to watching -- i'm trying to remember this now, pardon the interruption on espn, they always have a fact checker at the end and i have students do that for me because i have a way of exaggerating things. i said, you know, i don't know. she said soho stands for living

south of houston street. there is a south houston street, new york, and a south houston street in london. but i want you to turn on the layer for cholera cases by address. john snow was investigating london, and he was trying to figure out who was sick and who was not sick. i want you to click on each one of these, any of these red dots. i want you to notice the information he's collected. he wasn't collecting a lot of information. he was interviewing folks and writing down their address. he was recording the number of cases. and just so you know, the fid is not something he was collecting. it's what gis needs to collect to make it a digital feature. it's called feature i.d. so at this point, if i showed you this map, i would say, hey, you know what, where shall we go to figure out where the source is? you may have an idea. you may not. but the nice thing about gis mapping is it makes it really efficient. as i shared with you, tables

make maps. if i hover over the cholera cases by address, i click on the "show table," it shows the table of all the information he was collecting. and then, if we were talking through this in a workshop, i would ask you, have you seen any strategies that we saw in the "titanic" map that we could employ here that would make the visual and the story better? and if you noticed, on the "titanic" map, there were larger circles for cities with more people that traveled on the "titanic." new york city was large, paris was large. with information, we can change the signal and we can reduce the noise. so i'm going to hover over my layer. i'm going to say, i want to change the style. i want to change the style based on the number of cases. wait a second. and now i'm going to say, hey, do you notice what's going on here?

and at this point, you see a map that shows you the number of cases. and it tells us a different story. we might say, i want to go right to that big circle in the middle and see what these people have been up to and what's going on. the other nice thing is, i could say, you know what, i want to not just look at values by number in the location. i want a heat map. i want to see the hotspots. so i want you to notice, i literally just went from the style change in graduated symbols to, show me the heat map. at this point, we can say, all right, so now we've got to go check out that hotspot. you know what, john snow went to that hotspot and he noticed something right there. he saw in the middle of that area where a lot of people were sick were public wells. he told the city, take the well -- take the pipe, close this well down, let's see if people get better. and the story ended well, people started to get better.

and so today, if you travel to london, you get to go see john snow's pump. they've put it out there as a commemoration for him finding out that cholera was a water-borne illness. so i use this in both my world history class and my ap human geography class when i start my school year out. i want them to start thinking geographically and thinking about that geographic process and start them thinking that history and geography is cool. they say, wow, can i do this now? sure, take my class, or stick around with me, in a few months we'll be doing it in here. this is a recent research study that was done a couple of years ago where nasa is using remote sensed imagery to predict where they're going to see cholera risk. you can go to nasa's website and

see it. they worked with west virginia university on this. they're now using satellite imagery to predict where they can predict a cholera attack outbreak. and this was in the country of yemen. now we move on to another epidemic, another virus that shows up in our history textbooks. smallpox. i'll ask the question, it might show up in the chat box, but who was the person who developed the smallpox vaccine? by now i've got to believe we've got at least one edward jenner in the room. since it's a history presentation, i thought we would use some primary sources. here is the cowpox cartoon, because they were using the cowpox virus to vaccinate people. it's the first vaccine. notice the cartoonist saying, my gosh, people are going to become pigs or cows because they're using -- not pigs, but cows. they're going to become cows because we're inoculating them

with the cow virus. so where does smallpox show up in the teaching of u.s. and world history? for that i want you to go to -- back to the bit.ly site. and there's all that stuff. and i want you to click on the gallery for geoinquiry. over here you'll see the geoinquiry landing page. geoinquiries are 15-minute mapping activities designed by the software company. they have collections for a lot of different categories. i think it's up to 15 subjects. when you click on any of these, so if you click on u.s. history, you'll see there are level 1 and level 2 geoinquiries. these activities were written by classroom teachers. the maps themselves were designed by maps.com.

you can scroll down and you can look for the one, i think it's number 15. the great exchange. when you click on the great exchange, it will bring you to this map. the convey the geoinquiries are set up, they're two pages, pdf. follows the geographic inquiry model. you're given a teacher script to follow if you would like with buttonology of how to navigate the map. this one looks at the exchange of goods during the age of european exploration. to chest map, click on the url in the middle of the page. and that's going to bring you to this map. similar to the last map, you can click on the "contents" tab and it shows you a lot of different layers. the first part of this activity asks the students where is the potato from. i'm going to tell you that the top two answers start with the letter "i."

and the correct answer starts with "i." usually they get it wrong the first two times. they'll say ireland, or idaho. in this layer here, notice i can turn on the crop origins. i can turn on the legend. again, i just clicked on turn on crop origins, clicked on the legend, i can say where is the origin of the three common ingredients we use today. the potato is from the incan empire. corn is from central mexico. bananas are from southeast asia. then we start to think about the movement of ideas, the movement of things. and we say, go ahead and turn on present day potato production. and right there we show cultural diffusion. you ask questions about, what did you notice, which direction do they travel, what does this tell us about agricultural?

this lesson, i'm skipping through a number of steps, is leading to students taking a moment to explore the great exchange, the goods and items exchanged between the old world and the new world. students start out, and they fill out a worksheet. they look at all the new world plants. they look at the old world plants. then they look at the new world animals. the old world animals. and i want you to notice this old world animal, horses. we're going to come back to that in a moment when we talk about smallpox. we go to the americas and we learn that they had syphilis. then we look at the old world. they had smallpox, measles, chicken pox, malaria, yellow fever, influenza, the common cold. when i asked the students at the end of all this, often what my number one question is, did you learn something new, and did

something surprise you. this list right here is the number one surprise the students have. they're like, i knew europeans brought diseases to the new world. i didn't know how many. and question number 2 is, isn't syphilis a sexually transmitted disease? and my answer to them is, yes, yes it is. and we leave it at that. they've got their phones, they can go google it. but the idea here is to show you that this is a simple gis map we can use in the classroom that is showing the mapping and the movement of disease. this map, it's plants, animals, diseases. but students spatially see it, it's no longer just in the text, "europeans brought diseases over there." this gives them a list. so with that, i want to go back to the powerpoint and give some credit to dr. west who is going to speak last evening about the role of transportation on the central plains when it came to

smallpox. back to my powerpoint. so where does that play into our history? it plays into it with the ripple effects of european exploration. dr. elliott west is an historian of the american west. and a few years ago i had a wonderful opportunity to hear him speak about the grass revolution. he talked about the role of the horses in transforming culture on the great plains. he talked about how the spanish explorers caused a revolution because they brought horses home. horses are native to north america but they had become extinct. the spanish brought them back. in 1680 the pueblo revolt released the horses out of spanish control. the horse influenced food, trade, military, travel. when it came to providing power,

it revolutionized power. it gave natives ten times the amount of power they had before. here's the other thing it did. it sped up transportation. diseases, when smallpox did break out prior to the horse, it would often stay endemic and in one area and fizzle out. with horse transportation now, the disease did not have a chance to die out. it was transferred from one location to another. so when we think about how we can bring in medical geography, it's right here. it's already in our curriculum. we don't need to squeeze it in. that brings us to today. it brings us to this -- one of the most popular is coronavirus. this is the gis map. remember that saying, layers make maps, maps make apps. you're seeing a dashboard that is far more than just a map. it's a map but then there are also widgets connected to that data. they are keeping up with rates

by location, rates by recovery, rates by mortality, rates by specific location. and they're also showing the curve, right? and we're trying to flatten that curve. so this is a gis dashboard. at the end of the workshop i'll share with you a link, if you would like to learn to make your own coronavirus dashboard, you can have one made in an hour. as i said, tables of data. the gis, this is the information that johns hopkins was collecting. this was collected -- this is one a student of mine was making in class. i took his data set. he had collected the data on february 14, which was a weird day, it's valentine's day, and he's mapping the virus. it was just kind of weird. but it was still a good map. and so, anyway, just to show you this table is feeding this map that's feeding these info graphics. so when i think about

coronavirus, i'm going to step away from gis for a little while and think of, how does understanding coronavirus fit into our teaching of curriculum when we look at past events? that goes back to luis' quote, culture is the history we inherit. so many things coming up in the news, i'm like, wait a minute, we've seen this before. the first one was, the idea of entomology. the importance of naming the coronavirus and the virus that caused it. we've seen headlines about the naming of coronavirus. recent headlines from the bbc, coronavirus, trump grilled on use of, quote unquote, chinese virus. congressman mccarthy from california knocking the democrats after they say saying chinese coronavirus is racist. it might have been yesterday, i took it down today, the "mercury

news" in san jose, coronavirus attacks against asian-americans reported in the san francisco bay area. i started to think back to my own medical geography class,ny own teachings in my ap human geography class and my own history classes, i was thinking, we've seen this before. here is a primary source. 1981. from the cdc reporting on five young men, all active homosexuals, have a mysterious virus. we know it as hiv. it didn't start out being called hiv. here is a timeline of some events taken from hiv.gov. "the new york times" published an article, they called it a rare cancer, and homosexuals, and it started to be called gay cancer. august 11, 1981. dr. friedman khan, a local doctor in new york, was looking for some many to do some research. the government wasn't funding it. the government was slow to respond.

he raised $6,635 in private donations which was the only new money, public or private, that would be raised in the first year since this virus started to show up. 1982, may. "the new york times" publishes the first mention of the term "grid." gay related immunoefficiency disease which researchers were using in their reports on the new epidemic. it increased the public perception that aids affected only gay men. september 28, 1982. representative phillip burton and representative ted vise joined together for legislation that does not get out of committee. we see parallels. even though it's coronavirus or covid-19 is a faster moving virus, these themes are there. what we name it matters. people get stigmatized. we've seen in the news that we

should have been developing a test earlier. and then it becomes mainstream. and with hiv it became mainstream when heterosexuals got it, popular people got it. think about what triggered the shutdown of all sports. an nba player tested positive, the nba season is over. i want you to know, the cdc and the government was throwing money at hiv when regular, everyday people within our society at the time in the 1980s started to get it. then the media campaign starts up. and i remember in the 1980s, growing up, a 1980s kid, if i could, i would go out and get my very bright pink and orange and green shirts and maybe get on some jam shorts. i remember seeing these advertisements in "sports illustrated" and other magazines

trying to teach people about misinformation, who can get aids and who can't get aids. we're witnessing that today on the internet, some website saying, hey, this is misinformation, this isn't true but this is. we're seeing hiv today help understand where hiv is today. here is a gis map. i'm sorry, we're seeing where gis is helping us better understand hiv today. so that's my historical moment. let's come back to how gis is helping us understand this. one really powerful thing about gis is scaleability. because when you generalize things in larger areas, you tend to stereotype certain areas. this is a map that shows you where 50% of hiv diagnoses occurred in 2016/2017. this is a very different map from this map when i show it to you aggregated by state. so that's the nice thing about a gis map in helping us get to

answers. we change the scale. you can go to a live web map if you would like at aidsview.org, a live map down to the county level, providing education to people about how to get help, who is at risk and so on. they have info graphics there, helping to inform different regions and letting you know that of the 48 highest burden counties targeted with hiv, it's 48% are located in the south. again, they made that map using gis. and then, when we think of sub-saharan africa, we think of that as the global hotspot for hiv. but the truth is there too, that's an area that doesn't tell the whole story. this is a story from npr just a little under a year ago, they're using high level gis to

aggregate points down to a heat map to find out where are the hot incident spots in africa. the quote from the article, there's an increasing appreciation this epidemic is even less homogenous than people have imagined. the story is changing. you can see how the number of people in need of treatment and where those people are concentrated and it's shifting over time. folks, that's our story, right? we talk about how the only thing constant is change. we talk about how do things change over time. gis is helping us better grasp those things. it's an interesting -- i don't want to go too gis-y on you, but i will, because i love gis. they're using gps locations. think of our phones, right? we have gps locations, we can say, we get to track our friends and see where they are, we can watch the pizza delivery come up to our house. they're using these gps coordinates to tag addresses that they don't have addresses

for. they are collecting reports from certain health centers and geotagging those and mapping the data. there's a fascinating story on the dust bowl where they mapped out the growth of dust bowl by mapping newspaper stories. so really, it's not just information. you can map stuff, as long as you know where it happens. another recent headline. studies: 17.9% of people with covid-19 had no symptoms. i thought again to myself, hmm, i've seen that before. made me think of this woman. i'm going to assume -- i'll ask who is this woman. but now i hope there's a comment in the chat box that this is the infamous typhoid mary. the typhoid mary story. you know what, she was an irish immigrant to new york. she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. typhoid is a water-borne and

food-borne illness. she worked for affluent families, she worked as a cook for seven different families. one family, after ten of the 11 members of their family got typhoid, they hired a researcher to find out where it was coming from. he pinpointed down that mary mallen was carrying the virus. she worked in a restaurant where they served ice cream and cake on one day a week and they felt like that was the day that people got mostly sick because she wasn't cooking the food. there was a large trial about it, it lasted a number of years. she went into quarantine temporarily, then she was released, then they found her guilty a second time, and she's ended up spending the last 23 years of her life in quarantine. that triggered me to another connection to today. first, sorry, let me go back to

how we're seeing gis being used today with typhoid. then i'll talk about quarantine. so -- and what some people are calling the 21st century equivalent of john snow, scientists are using google earth to map out cholera outbreaks in nepal. and they are sequencing, gene sequencing, global positioning systems to localize where typhoid is spreading from its source. so that brings me now to my connection to today. quarantine. the venetian word meaning 40 days. you look on the news and you google all sort of things about quarantine. some are good, some are bad. i went with a nice safe one from "the new yorker," stealth kids movies for the era of quarantine. a little story about quarantine. you look at this one and you bring it into the history books. we talk about the bubonic

plague. croatia said newcomers had to wait for 30 days on an island outside of the city before they could come in. 1448, they shifted it to 40 days, which gave birth to the term "quarantine." the bubonic plague had a 37-day period from incubation to death. that's where the quarantine became such a successful time period. this is a picture of a boat, a quarantine boat right off the coast of the united kingdom. when we think of quarantine boats today, we've seen that in our history, in our local current events, with the cruise ships. we've sent a medical boat up to new york, a naval medical boat, to help care for people. so these are other ways we can bring in medical geography in a seamless, natural way.

another recent headline, then and now, how ithaca responded to the spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. i talk about the influenza outbreak when talking about world war i. here is a library of congress, shoutout to the library of congress, a tremendous supporter for this year's conference. here is a primary source from them saying, hey, here are the things you can do to prevent the spread of the 1918 influenza. looks very familiar as to what we're asking people to do at a national and international level now. so in my classroom, when i get here, i bring up an already-made gis map. it's a gif, it shows the contagious diffusion of the virus in 1918. there's a great website at the institute for health metrics and evaluation produced by the

university of washington where they've mapped a lot of present day dynamics in the united states. i'm going to take a moment to show you that map. this is a live map that can show you all sorts of different data in real time. so we can show, we want to show risk factors. i can go in here and i can show smoking daily. this shows a map of where people smoke. but i want to show you what happens when i bring this time slider back to 1996 and push play. i want you to just think about what's going on in our own society when we think of social history and what smoking was like in the united states in 1996, 'til today. i want you to see how the map changes.

the red areas show you where more people are smoking daily. and the blue areas are where they're smoking less. there are a lot of historical stories behind this map. in addition, we can change our map to life expectancy. when i go with life expectancy, we see areas where life expectancy ranges. if i go to southwestern virginia, life expectancy in this county is 73 years. i go up to northern virginia, right outside of d.c., one of the most affluent areas in our country, life expectancy is 84 years. that's development. that raises a lot of questions for my students, being in virginia. what's going on in december where life expectancy is 11

years more than just a five-hour drive away? then they'll say, mr. bunin, what's going on in the dakotas? and i take that and we connect that to native american reservations and other things that are contributing to life expectancy. to me, what i like about gis is it dispels myths, it allows us to get to the heart of learning and say, everything you read is true, when you shift the lens, you shift the perspective, you get different answers. so that brings me to one other way we can use gis, and it's access to medical care. and i wanted to give a shoutout to one of my students, heather. heather has been doing a number of service learning projects this year for me, she's a gis 2 student. it just so happens, i was on an airplane a few months ago, and i sat down and talked to a woman

from the university of virginia who works in their women's center. we talked about how i work with gis. she had worked at the epa. she's like, oh, i know a little bit about gis, i work in the women's center, and we have a number of patients who need care off-campus but for a variety of reasons they don't want to leave campus. i would love to have some maps that reduces the friction of distance for them. i would like a map that lets them know how close care is and how close transportation is. so they shared with heather a bunch of tables. she's been making a map for them where she is showing, is going to be able to show uva students and patients, here is where your care is, here is the bus you need to get on, here is how you will get there, and here is how you'll get back. she's going to provide for ease of opportunity paper maps as well as an app that a person fills out a survey and will return back to them where they

can go for care. so i want you to think about, as we go through this, the complete versatility i have shown you with gis. i've shown you an historical diffusion map, that's cool, down to it's mattering at a personal level for me. and that brings us back to this dashboard. the dashboard is being supported by ezri, our gis online, which is a lot of the software i've shared with you. google earth is another one you can use. i like the gis online platform. you'll see links at the bottom for how you can get a free site license for your school, free of charge, having your students make data-rich maps from the ground up. but the hope with this data dashboard is that the information is going to help public and health officials and emergency authorities make decisions, whether they should shut down events, whether their reactions to the pandemic are working. and that's the power of gis.

so we're now going to transition from that's gis in medical geography, now how can gis help you moving forward, because you're going to leave here in a few moments from this awesome online conference, and you're back to the reality we live in now. so think about, in your work, when does location matter? how about distance, direction? neighborhood, region, territory? or with my kids, i'll say turf. scale, working from the local, the regional, national, global scale. if you teach and you have any of these themes, then you need to consider giving gis a try, particularly as many of us are going to be teaching online, i'm going to share with you right now a number of resources ready to go in which you can have your students doing gis at home and it might not be as powerful as you up in front of the class but it will be pretty powerful given

that you're so far away. so to show you one option, we're going to be eating every day. i have an activity i use in class called map that recipe. tuesdays are taco tuesdays in my house. this is probably the cleanest that counter has ever been but we won't tell my wonderful wife elizabeth anything about that, right? this recipe, this idea of the great exchange in agricultural, every day we cook, we are living a history lesson. so how can you use gis to do that? first, take your kids out. do the great exchange activity. show them how food is diffused. then say, hey, where is the hearth of the food we're eating today? pull up a recipe and let each recipe be a row in your data tape. use the directions, as due the geographic inquiry. show them that hey, here is how much corn we grow, watch them go, wow, i had no idea we grew that much corn in the united

states. don't tell them most of it isn't eaten. then take the directions that i'm going to share with you, we'll make sure you have it at the end of this, and create a geoform. it's a form students fill out in which they map out every ingredient and tell you this is the ingredient, this is the dish i'm making, and i want to put it on the map. have them put it on a map. these are ingredients my students put on the map just a few weeks ago, learning about agricultural in ap human. in the first semester, we used this in my class, teaching about exploration. i realized there's a different pattern for ingredients than for recipes. the recipes come from many of the areas that were colonizing, the areas where the ingredients are coming from. that's where there's such a glow from italy or france. it may have been colonizing or the role of the silk road. a lot of recipes we enjoy today come from western europe and some from the united states.

then you can say, hey, my student elias, my student who his original -- he's a native of tanzania. we researched his favorite recipe. and then there's a great tool in our gis called connect origins to destinations. think airline map. say, hey, elias, what do you think, what's going on here? elias is like, i had no idea my native national dish is so global. i'm like, all right, now you're learning. and you got more out of this than you did out of reading about it in a textbook. and then you can say, hey, let's shift that to a story map. go out and find some more interesting things. and this is one on a student who did hamburger pie and found the word "casserole" comes from the french word for saucepan. i'm like, all right, more etymology, i like that. have them tell you the story of their favorite recipe or a favorite recipe and connect it to the age of exploration,

cultural diffusion and so forth. and then, just for fun, go john snow on them and make a heat map. and say, guess what, i didn't have to give you research from old archeology studies. your ingredient shoulder me the agricultural hearths of world history, fertile crescent, india, southeast asia, right there on the map. if you said, that's really cool, i don't have time for that, i just really want but quick and easy, give the geoinquiries a go. they're right there, readying to, the script is written. when we were writing them, we realized teachers aren't following the scripts. i will also make sure you have in the resources at the bottom of this keynote links to worksheets for your students so they don't see the answer key. look at the geoinquiries, see which ones support your research. my wife is starting a book club on the watsons of birmingham for local students in the area,

our -- sorry, neighbors and so forth. they're going to use the watsons go to birmingham geoinquiry to contextualize things for my second to fourth grade children. check out the story maps. story map gallery. have your students sit with them, look at them, say, what did you find surprising, what did you find interesting? did you find anything troubling? and then if you're having to cover curriculum and you still want to review world war i, check out this project on digitizing. this was a project that i mentioned i've worked on in the past. remember, reduce the signal, improve the noise. this is the map of the meuse argonne offensive. it's a mess. the battle was a mess. we digitized the features on the

map into an online map. the bottom left is the table. the top is the map. we actually then went with a group of teachers over there and collected digital media artifacts from the western front so you could bring the western front home to your students. take your students on a virtual field trip honoring service and achievements and sacrifice during world war i. many students find it hard to believe that over 14,000 american soldiers buried in western -- along the western front at the meuse argonne cemetery. this takes the students on a field trip in which they learn about where, why they're there and why does the u.s. government care about this spot. they see a 3d video of the trenches. and so the website is called teachingand mapping the geography of the argonne offensive. so if you are looking for a way

to jazz up world war i for your students, go check this site out. and then we also have a virginia geographical alliance teaching with primary sources partnership in which we developed a series of story maps called placing primary sources. they were actually presented at a poster today. these are story maps designed by teachers of u.s. and world history on benchmark topics that you have either taught or will teach. they are very dynamic. they are ready to go. you get editable lesson plans. no experience, no problem. not much energy, not much time, no problem. the activity's available to you. one, mapping placing america's journey westward. looking at the impact of the evolution of political parties in america. looking at the causes leading up to the civil war and looking at

the stepping stones to war. placing u.s. immigration. placing u.s. global expansion. over there the story of the american expeditionary forces. this map uses one of the maps from the mapping meuse argonne offensive, but it really looks at the mobilization of forces in america leading up to world war i. so it's more than just the activity i showed you previously. placing the progressives there. looking at how did that look differently when you shift locations, shift lens. looking at world war ii in the pacific, island hopping. this shows an interactive graph that shows you what happened to the casualty rates as the u.s. forces got closer to japan. placing u.s. involvement in world war ii allied victory in europe. and placing cold war conflicts. when i get to this point

typically in my unit once it was created, it was created by a wonderful teacher in which she really wanted a one-stop shop unit for her students to learn all about the geographic complexities of the cold war. this is the story map for you. placing civil rights in time and place and looking at the evolution of segregation in the united states and then the fight to end that. so this places civil rights in time and place around the united states. and then let's say you're like, hey, i like all this, but i really was curious about that coronavirus dashboard or covid-19 dashboard. go check out this website and learn how you can create your own monitoring covid-19 dashboard. it's a one-hour activity. and then, if you look at this shortened web address up here,

this is a survey that has been created to, if you think about it we're mapping out our responses to where coronavirus and covid is occurring around the world. this is a survey to allow teachers and educators to map out how are we responding, how are we teaching, and so forth. and they have a data dashboard that is cracking our responses. so please go in here and let's share other stories about this, not just the virus but how we as a society and as a people are responding to it. thank you. >> chris, this is so exciting. i want to click on everything at once. on behalf of everybody here, we just want to thank you so much. and everybody, chris volunteered to do this a week ago. so that's amazing. he put this together, he realized there was a need that we needed to get this out there,

and we were just delighted that he was able to put that together. go ahead, chris. >> i just wanted to give a quick shutout. thank you to you and the staff for pulling together an online conference in five days. and thank you for having me. >> weeknights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, we begin a night of vietnam war oral histories with robert certain, a u.s. air force b-52 navigator. while on a bombing mission over hanoi, his plane was shot down and he was captured by the north vietnamese. he discusses his 100 days in captivity and later his career as a chaxlain and the therapy he received to deal with the trauma of his captivity. he's followed by his wife who describes the harrowing days that followed his capture. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and watch american history tv every weekend on c-span3.

c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we're funded by these television companies and more, including midco. ♪♪ ♪♪ midco supports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. next, jason stacy and matthew ellington, co-authors of "fabric of a nation: a brief history with skills and sources for the ap course." they host a study session for the advanced placement u.s. history exam reviewing different eras of american history and providing strategies for the free-response answers. they also demonstrate how to