Last week Carol and I manned a stand at Scottish Learning Festival 2014. We had a wonderful time talking to so many teachers and educational specialists, everyone loves Digimap for Schools once they see it, it’s always an uplifting couple of days. One of the themes of the conference was employability skills – securing a highly educated, well prepared and well motivated young workforce able to compete in a global market. To address this theme I organised a session on Knowing their Place – Improving the Spatial Literacy of Tomorrow’s Workforce and was joined by Lisa Allen from Barrhead High School and Murdo MacDonald from Bellahouston Academy to demonstrate how their use of Digimap for Schools is ensuring their pupils have well developed spatial literacy skills. I set out a broad picture of how geographic information is used across many industries and identified learning outcomes within the Curriculum for Excellence which allow for students to analyse and use various types of geographic information and suggested that Digimap for Schools is an excellent starting point for working with geographic information in an ICT based setting. Lisa followed with some superb examples from Barrhead High including mapping urban and rural land use; calculating building density; flow line mapping and proportional circles for spheres of influence. Murdo complemented Lisa’s examples by highlighting the use of historical mapping to show change over time and stressed how useful it was for pupils to be able to access the service from home and it’s relevance for pupils completing their Duke of Edinburgh Award programme. Please check out Lisa and Murdo’s examples for some inspiring ideas!