Together, they provide powerful analysis tools for automated cartography and extensive analysis of information about place. Recent improvements in computer hardware and software allow the analysis powers of GIS to move effectively and affordably into the pre-university arena. The powerful tools included in a GIS permit teachers and students to explore and analyze information in new ways, focusing students activities on the higher order thinking skills of observation and exploration, questioning, speculation analysis and evaluation. Teachers can introduce students to maps as a model and geography as a discipline. Important concepts of absolute and relative location, place, region, scale, symbolization, and generalization can be brought in.
Students can study a given phenomenon over space, seeing how it relates to others.
They can survey the characteristics and relationships of geographically varied traits. They can examine a region and its features, and begin to understand the complex characteristics that identify and unite or separate areas, at scales local to global. Further study may focus on interrelationships between features and factors. Students can survey vocations that rely on the ability to gather, process, analyse, and report spatially varied data. Astute teachers will see the capacity for GIS as an integrative tool.