138 Designing a Geoinformatics Course for Secondary Schools – A Conceptual Framework Jüri ROOSAARE, Raivo AUNAP, Ülle LIIBER, Kiira MÕISJA & Tõnu OJA Abstract A set of study materials for the course of geoinformatics has been offered by the Depart- ment of Geography, University of Tartu as an optional for upper secondary schools in Esto- nia. The subject will be flexible and multilayered to support students with different inter- ests; practical exercises form the basis of study. Testing of the new materials is to be carried on during the next school year. 1 Introduction On January 2010 the Government of Estonia approved the updated National Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools. It lays more emphasis to optional subjects. The domain of sci- ence and technology includes robotics, applied programming, elements of economic mathematics and also a 35 hours elective course of geoinformatics. The Operational Pro- gramme for Human Resource Development financed through the European Social Fund is supporting the development, piloting and implementation of courses’ teaching/learning infrastructure. The Geography department at the University of Tartu (UT) is responsible for creating such an infrastructure for the course of geoinformatics. In current paper we will present and discuss conceptual framework for this task. 2 Educational Background The position of geography in the school education is changing at times in many countries, and not always favourably for geographers’ ambitions. Curriculum issues have been dis- cussed several times, for upper secondary school by REINFRIED (200,; 2004), TABULAWA (2002), FIRTH & WINTER (2007), and for the Baltic States by LIIBER & ROOSAARE (2000). Development of information technology (IT) has been seen as one of the main recent influ- encers in education introducing multimedia and e-learning environments. For geography the use of IT found its expression in wider and wider use of GIS. It came from a limited number of professionals using Arc/Info in 1980ies, grew to millions of browsers of geodata in 1990s and embraces now via Web 2.0 based solutions like map servers, WMS, WFS, and mash-up almost everybody using the Internet. Nowadays, it would be difficult to find a secondary school pupil who has not used Google Earth. Computer-based spatial literacy is a natural component of school geography education today and has many good practices (DONERT 2010, JEKEL et al. 2009, 2010). Also, explicit inclusion of GIS into school cur- riculum takes place, e.g. in Norway (RØD et al. 2010). A model of teaching geography we consider to be suitable for a small country like Estonia emphasises the importance to stimulate advanced scholars’ activities to penetrate deeper Jekel, T, Koller, A., Donert, K. & Vogler, R. (Eds.) (2011): Learning with GI 2011. © Herbert Wichmann Verlag, VDE VERLAG GMBH, Berlin/Offenbach. ISBN 978-3-87907-510-2. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).