GIS Day is on Wednesday, November 18, 2026. According to the official site at gisday.com, the day is "dedicated to sharing, teaching, and inspiring others with GIS." The first formal GIS Day happened in 1999, and Esri cofounder Jack Dangermond credits Ralph Nader with inspiring it. These days schools, cities, companies and community groups host their own events, big or small, public or private.

If you're a teacher, a club leader or the one GIS person at your office, you might be thinking about running something this year. The hard part usually isn't the idea. It's the setup. Installing desktop software on a room full of school laptops is a pain, and plenty of people don't have admin rights anyway.

So here's a workshop you can run with just a browser, using the free tools at geojson.cloud/tools. They run locally in the browser, there's nothing to install and you don't need an account. Files stay on the device for the guest tools, which helps when you're working with school or client data. More on that on the how privacy works page.

Before the session

Pick a theme people care about. Places around your school, favourite parks in your city, or stops on a field trip all work well. Then prep three small files:

A CSV with a name, latitude and longitude column for each place
A KML file, like a few placemarks saved out of Google Earth
A zipped Shapefile from your city or province's open data site

Keep each file small. The tools have a practical limit of around 10MB per file.

Step 1: Make points from a spreadsheet

Start with the CSV to GeoJSON tool. Have everyone add a few rows to the CSV, then choose the file or paste the text. The tool looks for columns named like latitude or lat and longitude, lng or lon, and every other column becomes a property on the point.

Good teaching moment: GeoJSON stores coordinates as longitude first, then latitude. If someone's points land in the ocean, they probably swapped their columns.

Step 2: Bring in Google Earth placemarks

Next, open KML to GeoJSON. Choose the KML file and convert it. Placemark names usually come across as properties. KML styling and network links don't carry over, which is a nice way to talk about how different formats store different things.

Step 3: Open a real government dataset

Now try Shapefile to GeoJSON. Shapefiles are really a bundle of files, so zip the .shp, .shx and .dbf together, plus the .prj if you have it. If the import fails, re-zip the parts at the top level of the archive instead of inside a folder.

If the coordinates come out as huge numbers instead of longitude and latitude, the data is in a projected coordinate system. Use Reproject GeoJSON to transform it to WGS 84. Make sure you know the source CRS first. Wrong CRS in means wrong geometry out.

Step 4: Check your work

Run each result through the GeoJSON validator. It flags common problems like a bad root type, broken coordinates and polygon rings that don't close. If it finds an open ring, the GeoJSON fixer can close it and give you a clean file to download.

Step 5: Put it all on one map

Finally, use Batch files to GeoJSON to combine the files into one FeatureCollection. Each feature keeps a source_file property, so you can still tell where it came from. Download the combined GeoJSON and open it in the editor to see everything on one map.

That's a full session without installing a thing. Students walk away knowing what GeoJSON is, why coordinate order matters and how to move data between formats.

Want to see it run first? Ben Arledge is hosting a free 30 minute online session on GIS Day, Wednesday, November 18 at noon MT: Converting KML, Shapefile and CSV to GeoJSON in your browser. Get the details and add it to your calendar.

If you're hosting your own event, register it on the GIS Day registration page by November 1 so it can show up on the global event map. Happy GIS Day.