(COURSE TIPS)

A Few Tips for Taking GEO221-V

The following is a list of tips accumulated over the past offerings from our various Instructors, Adrienne Domas, and Dr. Goldsberry. This is a challenging course. We will cover a lot of material: a diverse set of topics, details about geogrpahic/cartographic concepts that you may not have seen before before this class. You will be faced with a lot of information that you need to sort through, process, and learn. These tips are aimed at helping you do well on the exams.

1. Read your textbook. You can read it before or after you go through the lessons, whichever you prefer. If you read it before, it will provide some good background information for what we'll cover in the lessons. If you read it after, it'll provide supplemental information to the lessons and may help to clarify some concepts. Take some time to go through the review questions at the end of each chapter as well.

2. How the lessons are constructed:

We will start the course with basic geographic information that we will refer to through the rest of the summer session. We will then move on to remote sensing, GIS, and finish up with cartography. You'll see that there are important relationships between each of these concepts.

The lessons are broken into sections based on different topics. Key terms are described and are listed at the end of each lesson. The authors have made a special effort to describe the practical applications of the material we'll be covering. "Above and Beyond" sections provide additional websites you can visit to find more information about what we covered in that lesson. Although you are not required to visit these websites, they will

3. START EARLY!! You should be determined to try to do each lesson for the first time whenever it first opens up for your use. We try to spread out when the lessons become available and this will allow you time to get through each lesson a couple times before another one opens up. Then, by staying on top of the lessons as they are available, by the time it comes to study for the test the material (with all the lessons and other required tasks) the unit will not be nearly as overwhelming.

4. START YOUR LABS EARLY!! Your lab assignments, especially those related to GIS, will be time consuming. You will be better off starting to work on them as soon as they are assigned so that you can contact your instructor with any software problems you might have, questions about the assignment, etc.

5. Treat this on-line course like you would a regular 'in-person,' on-campus course. Stay on top of the readings and material so it does not become quickly overwhelming, which tends to happen with any online course (as discussed before). Put all the assignment/lab, quiz/exam due dates in your calendar because they will sneak up on you.

6. EMAIL YOUR INSTRUCTOR!! Email him/her with absolutely any question you have, no matter how small it is. You can even email them just to talk about anything, including non-course related questions. Try to use some of the other ANGEL avenues for encouraging discussion with other students such as the message boards or chat rooms.

7. When reading the online lesson, TAKE NOTES!!!! It will help you tremendously to take your own notes, highlighting what you think is most important, as you read through the lesson. Try to reword lesson concepts own your own. You will be amazed just how much this helps you.

8. When studying for an exam, use the lesson outline as an index of the lesson's key topics. Use this outline to construct your own study guide for the lesson.

9. When studying, or preparing to study for a exam, use the key terms/concept list as a starting base of areas of knowledge to know for the test. These are somewhat broad/somewhat specific terms, concepts, and ideas that have been addressed in each respective lesson which are important to know. They are a very good place to begin studying. If you can 'talk' about each term/concept in detail (including how it relates to the big picture of that unit and the course as a whole) you most likely know the material from that particular lesson very well. You can also make note cards of the key terms as a study aide.

10. Do the lesson's popup and bullet questions. Complete all of the activities in the brown "At this time..." boxes. They really do appear again on the exams.

11. When reading through the material presented keep asking yourself in the back of your mind "Given this information, what would make a good exam question?" - Once you do that practice answering your own quiz-type questions.

12. If there are many images and maps in a lesson, try to determine the main point they are trying to convey. Make a note of these main points and later show yourself a picture without a caption and try answering "What does this picture or map convey?".

13. Read the study guides and take the self-tests. They can only better prepare you for an upcoming exam.

14. When taking your exam:

Read each questions and ALL of its foils (answer options) VERY carefully.

Choose only the BEST option as the correct answer for each question! Remember, just because a foil is true does NOT mean that it is the correct answer for the question.

Do NOT choose "all/some/none of the above" automatically just because it is listed as a foil. Unlike some professors, we use these options as foils even when they are incorrect. So, read all foils very carefully.