Making room: Integrating geo-technologies into teacher education

Geo-educators focus on content standards, particularly the 1994 Geography for Life standards, as the primary rationale for integrating geo-spatial technologies into pre-service teacher education programs. In this paper, an alternative framework is proposed to infuse GIS and GIScience into existing teacher education programs. Specifically, the International Society for Technology Education's National Education Technology Standards (ISTE NETS) for Teachers will be used to re-position GIScience and geotechnologies beyond traditional boundaries of the geography curriculum. While the potential exists to use the ISTE NETS standards to infuse the social studies and earth-space science curricula with geotechnologies, ISTE NETS should serve to complement and support current efforts in the content areas-specifically those efforts outlined in the 1994 Geography for Life standards.