Expert perspectives on GIS use in Spanish geographic education

Abstract

The emergence of new technological tools for territorial analysis, such as cloud-based GIS, or GIS viewers, compels us to closely examine its usefulness in geographic education. Specifically, it raises the professors and teachers’ questions: what to teach? how to teach? and what will students learn? This research responds to these three questions by interviewing Spanish experts who know how to use these tools to teach geography at university and secondary school levels. The Delphi technique was applied to achieve this, which established consensus and led to the following results from experts’ own experience: (1) that GIS help to understand territory in an experiential and non-memoristic way and (2) they enable the development of spatial thinking. This paper concludes that changes in methodologies and integrate technical knowledge into teacher training are needed.