USE OF WEB-BASED GIS APPLICATIONS IN GEOGRAPHY TEACHING—THE IMPLICATIONS FROM TÜRKİYE

Abstract

Geography, as a discipline which examines the earth, aims to increase analytical thinking skills by instilling spatial thinking (ST) skills in students. The youth who enrich a sense of space with these talents will effectively solve the spatial problems they encountered. In the modern world, where spatial issues are frequently being faced with, ST is extremely important for analyzing and interpreting data. Geographical information systems (GIS) appear as a method commonly used to process data and transform it into spatial information. In this context, despite the renewal of the secondary education (SE) geography curriculum in Türkiye, with the components required for the use of GIS at the SE level, prevented the use of GIS in SE from reaching the desired level. Developments in technologies have also caused significant changes in the field of GIS with the power of cloud technologies and, the work done in the personal computer environment has been moved to the internet environment. Web GIS applications, which can be used via a web browser, are much easier to use than desktop software and can reach many users from any device with the internet. Within the scope of the study, a sample application was designed to use web GIS tools in geography teaching. With the application, it is possible to assess the students’ achievements in the geography lessons regarding verbal and spatial data. Thus, it was aimed to ensure the active participation of the students in the geography lessons, develop their ST ability, and perception of space.

Keywords

• teaching geography
• spatial thinking
• cloud computing
• web GIS
• Türkiye