Two conferences in Southern California this month will empower classroom teachers to innovate their practice and engage students.

Education’s Grand Challenges – GIS Opportunities

July 12 – 15 at Marriot Marquis & Marina, San Diego

This Esri Education GIS Conference provides unique learning opportunities to help you and your educational institution maximize its investment in GIS. A geographic information system (GIS) lets us visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends.

GIS prepares students for meaningful careers, enhances learning across a variety of disciplines, and improves campus operations. This GIS Conference will provide teachers with a great introduction in how GIS benefits organizations of all sizes and in almost every industry through. Teachers can participate in hands-on training and technical workshops to improve GIS skills, from creating a basic web map to advanced spatial analysis.

To register for the GIS Conference, visit: http://www.esri.com/events/educ/registration

Serious Game Conference at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Are you interested in getting into game design for the K-12 classroom?

A first class faculty of experienced game designers and college faculty will lead this immersion workshop, which will be held Monday, July 21 ahead of the main conference for Serious Play, a gathering of leaders in the serious games industry, Tuesday – Thursday, July 22 – 24 at USC in Los Angeles.

At the pre-conference workshop, Heather Browning, STEM Game Designer, Agnitus will show teachers how they can turn their lesson plans into game designs and create interesting challenges for your students to solve in inquiry style games. Teachers will learn how to use principals of motivation and engagement to move from writing lesson plans to building game designs.

To register for the Workshop and/or Main Conference, visit: http://www.seriousplayconference.com/