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By Joseph Kerski at ESRI, a series of 10 short videos discussing uses of a book about the now-extinct bird species, the Great Auk. He discusses cross-disciplinary connections, use of ArcGIS Online to explore the geography of events in the book, and implications of connecting geography and language arts.

"SlashGeo posts on the June 2nd announcement by National Academies Press that all their PDF book titles are now freely available for download, or for online reading. National Academies Press is the publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. A search using geography-related terms (e.g. GIS, GPS, geography, maps, cartography, etc.) will bring up long lists of titles. They're a bit of a mixed bag, though - most of them are more along the lines of committee reports, executive summaries, available resources and project planning than they are of more practical applications. Still, worth a look, especially at the price ;-). For many of them, you can also buy hard copies, and even embed a widget for them onto your website to allow people direct access to the book. "

"Let kids discover things on their own. Let them solve problems. One way to do this is ask questions about maps. But not just regular, turn to page 47 in your geography textbook kind of maps. But, you know, cool maps. So here ya go. A world map using only the locations of the world's runways, helicopter pads and airports." What questions can you ask? How about: Where are the developing countries? How do you know? Does location make a difference in who has access to knowledge? Does this matter? How does access to electricity impact how people live?

"Investigate the devastating earthquakes in January 2010 and compare them to past earthquakes using GIS as the investigative tool. Examine fault lines, population, ocean floors, plate boundaries, volcanoes, and other data to get a complete understanding of the physical and cultural geography of the Caribbean Sea region. "

"Tixik Heatmaps - Lets you add a basic heat map to a simple Google Maps display."

"The OpenHeatMap site lets you create heat maps and choropleths from uploaded spreadsheet data (CSV format), or Google Docs Spreadsheet data (which makes it continuously updatable). It supports location coding by latitude/longitude coordinates, or by a large number of name/code attributes (e.g. address, FIPS code, zip code, state, province, country). And as a bonus, you can also have time as a variable, letting you create animated heatmaps or choropleths."

GIS Links for state clearinghouses and federal data