In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers on all levels have had to adapt to an online or hybrid teaching environment. People in geography, a discipline that traditionally values field trips to connect theory to practice, have had to find online alternatives for educational activities that normally would have taken place in the field.This has led to several innovative practices, which, however, have only to a limited degree been purposively tested for efficacy because of the ad-hoc, enforced nature of the required changes. This project deals with this issue by studying, through student workshops dealing with the creation of online didactic walking routes in two cities, how students can obtain specific geographical competences such as interpreting different historical layers that collectively shape the current urban fabric through online cartography. We found that students reported clear improvements in geographical reasoning skills, regarding both GIS and heritage interpretation. There were no clear patterns regarding the role of familiarity with the studied city for the quality of the produced story maps. On final reflection, we argue that online cartographic exercises are a valuable addition to the geographers' educational toolkit to bounce forward to a more resilient, reflective educational practice after the pandemic.

In a context of online and blended-learning education, widely applied during the COVID-19 pandemic and retained after-wards, geography education found great support in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Already long before the pandem-ic, GIS were one of the most used research tools by geographers. Since a few years, educative curricula have increasingly started to include GIS. However, people without a background in geography such as future teachers may struggle to manage these technologies, both technically and in terms of the required spatial reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the design characteristics of online workshops with teacher trainees that should allow to deal with these struggles. The workshops used web GIS story maps and focused on local and foreign urban heritage in Madrid and Krakow, cities that both host a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The teacher trainees had to create digital didactic routes to allow prima-ry school pu-pils to become familiar with urban heritage processes. Fulfilling this task required the development of digital and didactic competencies, geographical reasoning, and critical thinking on familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage. In the Anthropocene epoch, accurate teaching projects like these workshops are needed to raise the spatial awareness of people, above all basic education teachers, who contribute to the making of future digital and global citizens. In conclusion, this paper could be-come a good-practice workshop design aimed at teacher trainees who at present show a lack of geographical and digital knowledge but will have to teach about this knowledge in the future.