On November 16th, we celebrated GIS Day by inviting GIS students from Washington-Lee High School to visit Blue Raster. Led by teacher, Ryan Miller, Washington-Lee offers several technology classes linked to James Madison University. For the fifth year, Blue Raster has hosted the class, giving students insight into the connection between what they learn in the… Read More
Finding Schools is now easier than ever with the College Map, the first geographic search tool published by IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) providing access to over 7,000 certificate, undergraduate and graduate-level schools. This all-in-one tool enables students, parents and counselors to filter potential programs for location, major, tuition and more. Including both certificate-level programs and… Read More
Blue Raster is proud to attend our 16th Esri User Conference in San Diego! This year we have teamed up with the National Arbor Day Foundation to replant our national forests. Place a pin on our map at #EsriUC, and we will plant a tree in Tahoe National Forest. Be sure to come check out Blue… Read More
Blue Raster has created new, one-of-a-kind functionality for the MapEd Project that displays School Feeder Patterns across the United States. A Feeder Pattern shows the trajectory of a student through the school system based on a geographic location. It is a unique way to visualize the School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS), a National Center for Education… Read More
This year, REL Midwest EdMaps launched two new story maps analyzing education trends in the Midwest. With the ArcGIS Online Map Journal template, the story maps naturally walk through the narrative behind the maps. The first story map, Advanced Placement (AP) Program Participation explores the expansion of the AP Program, a College Board offering giving high school students… Read More
We visited Austin, Texas last week to lead a second round of ArcGIS Online Accelerate training for the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Texas State Education Agency (TEA). We held a first round of hands-on training in August that covered the skills needed to create (and to teach others in creating) maps in ArcGIS… Read More
Due to the widespread success of School Mapper for the 2013-2014 school year, it has now been released for the second round of data collection for the 2015-2016 school year. Built in collaboration with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and Sanametrix, School Mapper provides District Superintendents the ability to add, update, and delete… Read More
As part of the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) new public awareness campaign, #RethinkDiscipline, Blue Raster launched The Hidden Cost of Suspension story map in partnership with Sanametrix. Since 2011, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice have collected data on suspensions, expulsions, and other practices that remove students from instruction. To make their data comprehensible at a glance by… Read More
Blue Raster has long recognized the importance of putting exploration tools into the hands of science enthusiasts. So we were excited to collaborate on a joint project with Bear Trust International, a non-profit dedicated to conservation education. As part of their STEM program, Bear Trust asked Blue Raster to create an engaging web lesson plan rooted in… Read More
Did you know that websites you visit every day, such as weather.com, are powered by open data from government agencies? Large amounts of government data are available on sites like data.gov, but often organizations have difficulty finding the relevant datasets. Open data initiatives like MapED Open Data provide authoritative, ready-to-use data driving many private-sector applications on… Read More