Abstract:

Remote sensing is very widely used in society, the job world, and science. In school, especially digital, remote sensing is not yet frequently used and the range of methods seems limited. This paper describes the international YCHANGE project. In the project a remote sensing curriculum with a progression of skills and methods was developed for secondary school. Sample learning units were published on the web-hub, using different tools (print images, Google Earth, BLIF). The web-hub also offers the possibility to publish student-created projects. Teacher professional development courses were conducted. Online questionnaires from some of these courses have fairly low power due to the small sample size, but show some improvement with regard to self-rated competence. Overall, the YCHANGE materials and training events seem to have been judged favorably by the teachers in many cases. The pilot studies also points to some differences between different areas sharing a language (Windisch and Heidelberg) and between the different Swiss language regions. Few studies in geography education comparing the Swiss language regions seem to exist so far, and this is an area that should be explored more in the future.

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