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Showing posts from December, 2010
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Started a new Twitter stream yesterday to collate stories of the Big Freeze... Follow @FrozenUK for the cold weather geographical digest... or add #FrozenUK to your tweets and I'll pick it up and add it when I get the chance... There is more snow falling as I type this...
Another tip off via Twitter... The INFINITE CITY is an article about a new book by Rebecca Solnit, who we like a lot at the Geography Collective. It's an 'atlas of San Francisco', but not the usual type... They are designed to make the reader think anew about the city of San Francisco—its history, natural habitat, economic function, political values—and, by extension, about the way we all imagine the places we live in. "A city," Solnit writes in her introduction, "is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without reconciling them."  Ordinary maps show only the physical infrastructure that these "many worlds" share—streets, rivers, monuments.  The maps in   Infinite City , on the other hand, treat the physical city as a blank slate, on which many different experiences can be overwritten, like texts on a palimpsest. Exciting urban geography... Sounds like a fasci
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The International Baccalaureate is being considered by a growing number of teachers as an alternative to more traditional courses. IB Geography - Reflecting on the 'new' syllabus This CPD course will help Post-16 teachers, both new and experienced, reflect upon the demands of the IB geography diploma programme. The 'new' 2009–2017 syllabus will have completed its first cycle in the summer of 2011 and this one-day course will provide an excellent opportunity for teachers to reflect upon the first cycle and make plans for the next. London - Friday 24 June 2011 Further details and online booking are available on the GA website The course tutor is Richard Allaway, creator of the rather wonderful GEOGRAPHY ALL THE WAY website.
A new version of Google Earth was released recently: GOOGLE EARTH 6 ... It includes millions of 3D trees, and other improvements, including better integration with Google Street View Go to the AMAZON for example, and you can wander the jungle and explore some of the tree species in the rainforest... I'm sure we can come up with some ideas for using this in the geography classroom :) And don't forget my Innovative Geography Teaching funded project from back in 2005...
David Lambert gave a keynote lecture to the 2010 SSAT annual conference on Friday 26 November.  He addressed round 1500 school leaders on the question: are subjects in crisis?  Obviously he focussed on geography and made some positive remarks about the recent White Paper The Importance of Teaching and its intention to recentre the school curriculum on 'knowledge'. You can see a video of David's lecture on the SSAT website (take a look at Dylan Wiliam's session while you're there....) The slides that David used (you might want to listen to the presentation while watching the slides, or put them side by side on the screen...) are available via SLIDESHARE ... and have been embedded below... November 2010 SSAT Presentation View more presentations from GeoBlogs . If you're snowbound today & your school is closed take a look... Think of it as a little impromptu CPD P.S: This is my 1,111 th post on this blog...