Historical Aerials

Historical Aerials is a nice and simple way to find historical aerial photographs from across the USA. The catch: it's a commercial site and thus they charge for the images.

The Augmented World

From their website: AugmentedWorld is a location-based, interactive, educational crowd science platform that facilitates the collection, presentation, and sharing of scientific data. AugmentedWorld facilitates the examination of natural phenomena by the generation of an open question that leads to an inquiry-based learning process.

Read more about it and how the tool can benefit teaching and learning: Barak and Askale (2018): AugmentedWorld: Facilitating the creation of location-based questions. Computers & Education, 121.

The COPUS Analyzer

Here a recent paper in Science that basically proofed and quantified what we already know: most STEM teaching and learning is (still) dominated by passive lectures. Here's what's cool: the authors created an online app to conduct their analysis and now we can use the app to compare our own teaching to the large data set used in the study. This is a great examples of crowd-sourcing additional data while at the same time give teachers a way to place themselves into the context of the wider community.

• Stains et al. (2018) Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities
• Press release (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln)
• COPUS Analyzer

The Smart Citizen Toolkit

This is interesting. First, you have the Smart Citizen Kit = a simple gizmo for citizen-based environmental monitoring, especially for urban area. Then you add Citizen Science Toolkit as a process and community.

How many PVs do you need?

More specifically: what's the area of solar panels that you need to power a country?

Wind Power in the USA

Seen on Maps Mania: America Powered by Wind

• The U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB)
• Wind Farms Through the Years
• Global Wind Atlas

Population

Resource Watch

Resource Watch is a pretty incredible web mapping tool. You can load-in all kinds of data sets and also download the underlying data, for example the Global Power Plant Database or the Climate Vulnerability Index.

SplashMaps

SplashMaps makes the perfect gift: define your area of interest and they make you a wearable map.

The Power of Ten using Census Data

That sounds weird, but works very well - zooming-out from a census block to the country and you can pick your starting location: A map "dealing with the relative size of things" in the American Census

ArcGIS Image Analyst

People always forget: ArcGIS Image Analyst is part of ArcMap / ArcGIS Pro and works just fine for image analysis in my (limited) experience. Now also available for free with ArcGIS for Personal Use and ArcGIS for Student Use.

The Climate Atlas of Canada

The Climate Atlas of Canada is great: rich content with an interactive gridded map and links to data and reports

DigitalOcean eBook: How To Code in Python

DigitalOcean eBook: How To Code in Python looks promising: a nice (free) eBook in various formats and good ideas on how to teach and learn coding with Python. Nice OER option!

• How To Code in Python 3 (eBook as PDF)

EOS Land Viewer

The EOS Land Viewer is a simple, intuitive web interface that EOS provides as a direct market product to the public. Land Viewer allows non-expert users to select a geographic area for analysis, an earth observation data types, and then apply their choice of on-the-fly imagery analytics.

Land Viewer seems to be one part of the broader EOS Platform. You can read more about it here: New EOS platform lets you run image processing tasks in browser (be warned: this reads like a paid advertisement like many things on Geoawesomeness).

Humboldt Glacier (Venezuela): Drone Videos

Here are three incredible drone videos by Helena Carpio of the Humboldt Glacier in late February 2018.

• https://youtu.be/cqHXK3v1WII
• https://youtu.be/t3xCB7k6aR4
• https://youtu.be/KLbO0eNE4aQ

Alternative Fuels Data Center

The Alternative Fuels Data Center (US DOE) provides a nice interactive map and complete data download option for alternative fueling stations (e.g. electric, hydrogen, etc.) across the country. Data are updated monthly.

Perceptions of Science in America

A new report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• The report
• The quiz
• The figures

A Domain of One’s Own

Great essay by Alan Jacobs Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future highlighting the importance of owning (and thus controlling) your digital work and identity.