Blended tools for remote sensing education

Remote sensing can be categorized as one type of information technologies. It is better to work side by side with some other technologies such as GIS, GPS, and some information technologies in order to solve real world problems. Productivity of college students can be promoted in critical thinking and problem solving by remote sensing technologies. The objective of this paper was to develop blended remote sensing tools for college students in remote sensing education. ERMapper and PG- STEAMER were used for typical remote sensing implementations. Satellite images and digital orthophoto images were enhanced by PG-STEAMER and Snaglt. ArcGIS and ArcPAD were used to enhance integration of remote sensing and GIS. Database management was done by application modules developed by college students using Visual Basic.NET and Visual C#.NET. Alice and MapViewSVG were implemented for web pages publishing. The developed blended remote sensing tools can be integrated as an information system using Visual Basic.NET. Digital image compression, file format conversion, image enhancement, database manipulation, interactive 3-D graphics, image retrieval and manipulations, terrain animation, and GIS integration were what the blended remote sensing tools provided. Results indicated that students can implement commercial remote sensing software packages more effectively. Students with remote sensing background can implement more information technologies to solve problems encountered in the near future when they join the job markets.