Over the last few days I have read the book Map Addict by Mike Parker.

This book was full of good general knowledge that I did not know before I read it; some of the facts that I thought were the most interesting or the most useful are listed below:

• Officially the most boring 1 x 1 km grid square of the entire 320,000 on the 1:50,000 landrange seriesL SE8322. This is located between Goole and Hull and it only contains a pylon line grazing on one corner.
• There is no other patch of land on the planet that has been as comprehensively, and so stylishly, measured, surveyed, plotted and mapped as the 80,823 square miles of the Great Britain. (this may be a slightly biased statement but I like the way that Parker put it).
• The United States is one of only four countries on Earth officially using imperial weights and measures; the others being Burma/Myanmar, Yeman and Brunei.
• Parker also explains how the numbering system for A; Roads were originally derived. The country was divided by spokes radiating out from London. The A2 went straight up to Edinburgh, the A2 to Dover, so that all main roads between the two were numbered A1x or A1xx. The A2 roads were between Dover and Portsmouth, the A3s a long tranche right to the far end of the West Country, the A4s a giant wedge that took in most of the Midlands and wWales, the A5s everything between the lines from London to Holyhead and Carlisle, and the A6s the remaining backbone of England , back round to the A1. The last three numbers – A7. A8, and A9 – are Scottish-only roads that were similarly centred on Edinburgh.
• The ‘Blue Marble’ image taken by the Apollo 1972 space mission was inverted from the original image so that it fit the traditional view.
• The part of the book that made me smile the most was when Mike Parker said that heritage railway lines should not have the same symbols as real railway lines and instead should be replaced by a pictogram of a grinning old man dragging a reluctant grandson along.

It is well worth a read.

I spent the last two days at Microsoft UK Headquarters in Reading. This was for the innovative teachers summer camp organised by Stuart Ball. I was impressed by the scale of the Microsoft campus; five huge buildings! The inside of the building (Building 5) we were in was open, light and airy; if only schools had the same design budget

The day was introduced by Stuart, one the key things that I got out of the day was the number of free add-on’s and stand alone programmes created by Microsoft for educators. Some of these I have come across before but many were new to me. This was really refreshing as mentally I always categorise Microsoft as boring nuts and bolts.

There was a huge list of tools/apps to support learning:

• Auto Collage – allows you to create a collage merging many pictures together on one page. Available Here
• Pivot – a utility to allow data to be visualised. Needs a powerful graphics card. http://www.getpivot.com/
• Songsmith – Sing and add a backing track automatically. Available Here
• Mouse Mischief – create an interactive voting system by connecting multiple mice to one computer; a PowerPoint add-on. http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-mischief/
• Live Essentials – add on for windows http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials
• Maths Add-In and Chemistry Add-In – Equation add-in for MS Word.
• Plex for PowerPoint – allows you to canvas PowerPoint slides. A different way of organising slides. http://www.officelabs.com/pptplex
• Photostory – animate a series of photographs. Available Here
• Worldwide Telescope and Mars Explorer – Allows your computer to function as a virtual telescope. http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
• Kodu – a visual programming environment. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/
• Community Clips –  useful for creating screen casts.Simple to use. http://communityclips.officelabs.com
• Deep Zoom – allows you to overlay images so that you can zoom through and into multiple images. https://www.silverlight.net/learn/quickstarts/deepzoom/
• Canvas for One Note – similar to plex but for one note. www.officelabs.com/projects/canvasforonenote/
• Bing Visual Search - Displays search results through pictures. http://www.bing.com/visualsearch
• Bing Maps - better than google maps in some situations because it has OS Maps built in. http://www.bing.com/maps/
• Office Web Apps – online versions of office. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/
• Ribbon Hero – a game that teaches you where to find functions on the Microsoft Office toolbar. www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero
• Flash Cards – Web based flash card creation tool. Great to test yourself as it remembers which topics you are good at and which need more work. www.educationlabs.com/projects/flashcards
• Photosynth – Stitching together photographs http://photosynth.net/

All of the above programmes and utilities are free for educational use.

I have only used some of these programmes / utilities before; most I have not. My plan for the coming months is to try and work through them all and try them out to get ideas of how I can use them in the classroom.

The main activity of the two days was creating Innovids. There are some that were created earlier on the Innovative Teachers YouTube channel here.

This was a valuable two days for me not only because I got a huge range of ideas and teaching tips that I can use over this academic year; additionally it recharged my ‘tech’ batteries ready for the new year!

There are a wide range of resources on the Microsoft Teachers Blog

These are just my initial thoughts which will develop over time.

I have just returned from a five day Geography trip to Dorset. I took a group of Lower Sixth geographers to the Townsend Centre in Swanage. We had an action packed week of fieldwork allowing the students to collect a great range of data and experience ‘geography in the wild’.

Monday – Drive from Essex to Dorset. Our afternoon was spent exploring Swanage and an introduction to the Geography of the Jurrassic coast.

Tuesday - Looking at processes on Chesil beach. We visited four different sites along the beach looking at change. This is a fantastic piece of fieldwork as it is really easy for the students to see the visible change in the beach material.

Wednesday - Visiting the town of Boscombe to look at the surf reef and the redevelopment of the sea front. This was put in contrast with the town centre of Boscombe that has not been developed at all.

Thursday – Despite the poor the weather we visited Studland and looked at the human issues surrounding the management of the dunes. We also looked at Sand Dune succession. We also walked to Old Harry.

Friday - We drove to visit Lulworth Cove and visited the Cove and Durdle Door. Following on from this we drove home back to Essex.

Visiting the Dorset coast allowed the students to see case study locations ‘in the flesh’. One student said ‘this is the first time I have got excited about geography’.

I will blog more about the trip over the next few weeks.

This was the first group that I have taken to the Townsend Centre, we had a great time and I can’t wait to go back next year!  More details about the centre can be found on their website http://www.widehorizons.org.uk/t_home.aspx.

The image below takes this a step futher and considers the different elements of Bloom’s Taxonomy and links them to different teaching activities. This is a useful tool because not only does it instantly provide an easily accessible list of teaching activities to choose from when planning a lesson, but also classifies those activities. This would mean that  to ensure a balanced range of tasks in a unit of work tasks could be selected from different segments of the wheel.

(Thanks to Russle Tarr who orignally posted a link to the image on Twitter)

For various reasons we are switching from doing unit 4B with our A2 Geographers to Unit 4A. Going from Issues Evaluation to the fieldwork / skills paper.

This book is the best book on fieldwork that I have seen. It explains every skill in the AQA AS and A2 syllabus in really easy to follow student friendly language.

I am also planning on using it with my IB Geographers for their Internall Asssessment, there will also be pages that are useful for GCSE Geography.

Well worth a read!

One of the things we looked at was using books in Geography.

After a group discussion the partipants submitted books that they had used in their classroom.

For the last few weeks with Year 8 I have been looking at the Geography of Stuff. Broadly following ideas from the Geography Teaching Today unit of work. The full scheme of work with resources can be found on the Geography Teaching Today site here.

This lesson looks at the breakdown in cost of producing an iPhone and also the production methods.

Below is the PowerPoint I produced to support the lesson.

I have also produced a worksheet looking at the breakdown in cost.  This can be downloaded here. Cost Breakdown for Apple I pads

I also used an article from the Independent on the 27th May 2010. This is available on the Independent website here.

I am teaching the lesson for the first time tomorrow so will probably tweak it after then.

This week with my Year 8′s I used salt dough to get the students model glacial landscapes.  I used salt dough because it was cheap and non-damaging to the classroom.

Ingredients for the Salt Dough

• 1 Cup Table Salt
• 2 Cups Flour
• 1 Cup Warm Water

Mix the flour and salt together – gradually mix the water in to salt/flour mix. Mix the dough until it achieves the desired consistently.  The dough I made was slightly wet so maybe next time I would use slightly less water. It then needs to be refrigerated overnight.

I used one of the above batches for two students; this gives a large orange sized amount of dough for each student.  This took about 30 minutes to make 12 of the above batches for 24 students. The cost was less than £3 in total. I individually wrapped each student sized portion of dough in sandwich bags.

Students Work

I had the students use the dough to model a number of different glacial features. This was to assess how well they had understood the preceeding lessons on glacial landforms.

This was a messy activity. If I did it again I would use an art room or at least a room without a carpeted floor! However on balance the students improved their knowledge of glaciation so their knowledge improved!

Download now or preview on posterous

Energy in the Atmosphere.pptx (560 KB)

Posted via email from IB Geography Wiki Blog