So I'm Michelle Albaje, this is Michael Myers. Oddly enough we're the teachers that came without a PowerPoint so just real quickly we just wanted to say first thank you so much for inviting us here. We are looking at ways at using OpenStreetMap and all of the different data platforms that you guys

are talking about into the classrooms. How best to integrate them I guess into our curriculum because we are teaching the kids that are going to be graduating and working for you guys with you guys so what we're trying to do and Mike is going to tell you a little bit about this in just a second is getting them as familiar with the platforms as familiar with OSM as early as possible.

So Mike's actually used it in the classroom so he's going to tell you about it now. So yeah as exciting as the PowerPoint would have been with pictures of teenagers and Chromebooks in front of them I actually did something that I never thought I would do again. I went and taught middle school

for a day and taught them OSM and how to use it and how it was applied. One of the benefits of it was that it kind of made the connection between the STEM kids and the social studies kids but it also worked for me as a recruiting tool for AP Human Geography. The middle school students it exposed

them to a lot of things that they hadn't been exposed to prior to that identifying the uses of GIS and remote sensing and also it opened them up to development as the area that I teach in is rapidly growing in population so in terms of the kids when they were mapping they were actually mapping

in some cases places that didn't exist on the map because their house wasn't there. Now I will say thank you to those people that commented. I did run into one roadblock for anyone teaching middle school students. You're brave but first there are limits to what they can do on Wi-Fi so teaching them I should

have planned ahead and had them log in to OSM the day before and many of them ran into troubles with getting the confirmation email because they can't check their email so they logged in as me. I was greeted with lots of messages about like nope that wasn't what you were supposed yeah I know we're

fixing it but one of the things that we've also done is I've used OSM with my high school students and this is actually making a connection with the high school students and the middle school students but more specifically we've got a nationally recognized STEM program at the high school and I'm starting to work with the STEM teacher to incorporate the STEM program in with

the AP human geography program in terms of mapping looking at computer programming and GIS along with that we've started a service we've started sorry there we go that's the term we started service based learning

through College Board and AP they've got a new program called we service and the program focuses on service based learning which is academically structured as opposed to just community service for human geography specific it's focused on hunger issues so we're using it to map out first locally

where food sources are located grocery stores farmers markets things of that nature and trying to identify food shortages and food deserts and then our plan is to develop that into a service project and then expand upon

looking internationally at food needs and where those needs are located and how we can address those needs both of us and all the teachers here we really look forward to talking with all of you guys and help us help us help us you know help the kids

understand and to be able to use the platforms because they get excited when they understand what goes into making that map that we're showing them they really really get excited you know if they if they know you know how when you guys were showing the the map about the corporations and you know where they

were doing the data if we could show them how that happened how we got there how that map looks the way that it looks they really start to get into it and everything is data and everything is geography now so that's our job so please help us as much as possible thank you so much