Ordnance Survey – Great Britain's national mapping agency
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Ordnance Survey is keen to encourage and support the use of digital mapping within the classroom. As there are several categories of schools, sixth form colleges and tertiary education facilities, we have developed a number of licensing arrangements to recognise their different funding arrangements and usage:
- Local Education Authority (LEA)-funded Primary and Secondary schools including integrated 6th Forms (and those Voluntary Aided & Voluntary Controlled Schools who also get funding from DfES) are licensed to use Ordnance Survey digital data under our national Mapping Services Agreement with Local Government, together with any additional data that the Local Authority/LEA might have licensed from us.
- Independent / privately funded Primary and Secondary schools (including those with integrated 6th Forms) may obtain a free licence from Ordnance Survey for `teaching and classroom use' only.
- Separate 6th Form Colleges, Colleges of Further Education and Higher Education establishments including Universities, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council, may all benefit from the terms of a central agreement with the Joint Information Systems Committee [for Further and Higher Education] (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/, and may access data held by the national data centre ‘EDINA’ http://edina.ac.uk/ which is hosted at the Edinburgh University Data Library.
- Independent and privately funded 6th Form Colleges may licence data directly from Ordnance Survey.
Schools
The use of Ordnance Survey map data in geographical information systems (GIS) has transformed the way data is interpreted and used in business. Specially adapted GIS, now available for both Primary and Secondary use, are beginning to make a similar impact in education. These provide an excellent opportunity to fulfill the ICT requirement for geography, and other subjects.
Further Education
Find out about data samples available to Further Education and view our full range of commercial digital data.
Discover Ordnance Survey map data for free through the new DIGIMAP agreement
Higher Education
View our full range of commercial digital data and find out what sample data is available.
Edina
Ordnance Survey has negotiated a deal with JISC and Edina to provide Ordnance Survey mapping to Higher Education Institutions, via a service called DIGIMAP. An annual subscription is paid by the Institution and the service is then free to end users. Take a look at the Edina web site for more information on the service and to see if your Institution is subscribed.
This service has now been made available to further education establishments
Educational software accepting Ordnance Survey digital mapping
Details of software accepting Ordnance Survey digital mapping can be found here.