GIS Application And Thinking In Middle School Geography Teaching

Since the1960’s, the Geographic Information System (GIS) has played an increasingly important role in the national production and in our life. The research and application on it are becoming more and more extensive and profound both at home and abroad. GIS, a new geographic information technology, has powerful geographic information storage and spatial analysis functions which happen to coincide with the geographical scientific research requirements and also provide a new way of thinking for geography teaching in middle school and high school students of geography. The goal of new basic education curriculum reform in China is to cultivate qualified citizens, while the GIS plays an irreplaceable role in the cultivation of students’space literacy, information literacy and some other aspects. Therefore, it’s of strong practical significance to research in how to introduce GIS to secondary school geography teaching to promote secondary school geography curriculum reform.This paper, on the basis of consulting a large amount of literature at home and abroad and combining my teaching practice, discusses the importance and many functions of GIS able to be applied to geography teaching in secondary school, designs a general model to apply GIS to secondary school geography teaching, completes the design of three typical application cases and finally makes an analysis of the present problems and difficulties in our country with the application of GIS to geography teaching in secondary school and puts forward relevant suggestions and comments. The main work of this paper includes:(1) Definite the functions of GIS that apply to geography teaching in middle school. At first, GIS was introduced in middle school as teaching content aimed at making the middle school students know and understand the latest development course of the geography. This paper’s main research is that how GIS helps the middle school teachers to perfect their teaching content and help students to improve their information literacy and spatial thinking as a technological mean. It main concerns spatial analysis function such as overlay analysis of GIS, buffer analysis, storage and display of massive geographic information, function of electronic map, simulation of reality and fast rendering terrain profile.(2) It comes up with a model that can apply GIS to middle school geography teaching and put it into practice, and also designs three practical application examples. The model includes determining subject, collecting materials, selecting teaching methods, handling subjects, subject appearance and expression and so on. The examples are world’s climate, territorial development difference and research-based study, which are very important in middle school geography teaching and can show the powerful functions of GIS.(3) It analyzes and explains six problems in GIS application to secondary education and introduces related suggestions and opinions. The problems include: immaturity of theoretical research in middle school GIS geography teaching; unfinished construction of GIS helping teaching information environment, backward GIS teaching platform development and can’t be widely used, incompetent middle school teachers of GIS teaching, incomplete education network and lack of abundant but free GIS teaching data. It is on the basis of these problems that suggestion is introduced:government and administrative department on education promote relevant research on theories and practice establish teaching resource database of GIS middle school geography teaching and reinforce GIS skill training among normal school students and serving teachers.