Earth from Space

This is just cool: the Earth and the Moon from a CubeSat headed for Mars. This is similar to the famous Pale Blue Dot image from 1990.

What Is the Point of a Makerspace?

I get it - sort of. What Is the Point of a Makerspace? and the associated podcast (with transcript) helps to clarify things - sort of. The overall argument: a maker mindset is essential for a happy and successful life in the 21st century. In other words: all that 'new' learning becomes much more effective if it makes an actual product (as opposed to just planning or designing it).

We have a word for that already (especially in higher education) and it's called student research and creative scholarship: a) you make something tangible, b) you need to share it with others, and c) it has to have some level of academic scholarship associated with it.

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Excellent points: Why No One is Reading Your Report (by Stephanie Evergreen) and also applicable to the way we usually present scientific information.

http://stephanieevergreen.com/why-no-one-is-reading-your-report/

MappiMundi

Seen on Maps Mania: MappiMundi is a new interactive mapping platform for recording and exploring historical events in space and time.

EO Browser

EO Browser looks pretty useful. From the website: EO Browser combines a complete archive of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, ESA’s archive of Landsat 5, 7 and 8, global coverage of Landsat 8, Envisat Meris,  Proba-V and MODIS products in one place.

EarthTime

EarthTime is a pretty slick web-based animation / time sequence of climate change impacts seen from space. The deforestation examples are particularly striking. I also like that you can export the views as images, videos, and animated GIFs (see example below).

Map Warper

Map Warper has been around for a while - a nice and free tool to georectify old maps / aerial photographs, etc. Once done, the (now georectified) map can be exported as a GeoTiff, KML, PNG, etc.

Boston 3D Buildings

OK, let's all pretend to be impressed: Boston 3D Buildings as of 2/15/17. Sure, it looks cool (maybe), but what can you realistically do with this?

Maps in Story Maps

Indeed, you can use maps in Story Maps! It seems a bit weird to have to even mention that, but I guess Story Maps have matured. To me, a Story Map template has always been just one of the many ways that I can create a web app from an ArcGIS Online map. In other words: the map(s) come first.

Note to Esri: perhaps you should consider simpler and more consistent terminology...it's getting a little confusing!

Anyways, How to use maps in Story Maps introduces two Story Maps that demonstrate how to use maps in Story Maps. If that sounds confusing, you are not alone.

The Nuclear Waste Problem

Ecological Footprint

The Ecological Footprint map is rendered nicely using Tableau. You can download the data for each country, but I can't find a way to just grab the complete data set.