Geography and all that Jazz

SAGT 2008: the REPORT On Friday night, after setting up the GA stand, had a meal at the very nice, and very French Le Petit Paris restaurant on Queensferry Road. A windy night followed, and in the morning it rained on and off most of the day. For the second year, the conference was held at Edinburgh Academy. First thing was to grab a coffee and man the GA stand with the other publications, and to start handing out over 150 free satellite image maps of the earth from space, and also have conversations with the 290 odd delegates. The maps were donated by the GeoSphere project . At 9.40 the publishers’ awards, presented by John Vannet, were announced. In the Book category, the GA picked up both the awards that were available. A ‘Commended’ award went to ‘Caring for our World’ by Fran Martin and Paula Owens, and the WINNER in the book award went to the Teacher’s Toolkit. Margaret Roberts collected the awards. It was then across to the Hall for Malcolm McDonald’s Presidential Ad...

Ollie Bray has just completed a series of 5 posts on the use of the iPhone in education. Plenty of exciting ideas here, and the applications that he mentions are all cheap ! Of course, you first of all need an iPhone and they aren't cheap... You can get them free on certain tariffs, but I don't have £500 a year to spend on my phone. Of course, they may well come down in price. Ollie will be doing some seminars at the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers conference in Edinburgh on the 25th of October, as will I . If you're coming along you'll also find me manning the GA stand in between times...

SAGT 2007 Picture by Val Vannet Just back from 2 days in Edinburgh for the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers ' conference. I was presenting an adapted version of the Royal Geographical Society presentation I blogged about HERE . Arrived by train, and up to my nice hotel , for which I got a good deal with "LastMinute.com". Very mild after the chill of Paris. Wandered over to the academy through the Royal Mile and down the cobbles. The conference was held at Edinburgh Academy. A good venue. Picture by Flickr User Dave Fitch John Vannet was setting up the Publishers. GA, RGS and GGiP amongst them. Also met up with "the boys from the OS" again and others... Then had a rather nice caprese Pizza and a bottle of Peroni with friends. Also down to Princes St. to have a bit of a shop and met up with Rob Chambers , who was also presenting a session. He had been due to present at 2006's conference too, but fell ill on a trip to Kenya and was unable to attend...

SAGT 2006 Another great conference, well organised and attended and with some excellent seminars (and then there was mine...) Had a marvellous reception at the Discovery Point, followed by a series of workshops and meetings with friends old and new... I will post more on this in the weeks to come as time permits... There is an illustrated blog on my website HERE . There is also a new GOOGLE EARTH blog where you can see all the slides I used in my 2 SAGT presentations. It was good to meet up with Ollie Bray once again. He has some wonderful ideas from his presentation: "50 Ideas in 50 Minutes" which are available at his site http://www.olliebray.com (he's offered to sell me my own name back...) http://www.geographyataltitude.co.uk/ Resources from a trip to Denali. Update Ollie has now posted a Google Video of his entire presentation which lasts 1 hour and 40 minutes. Go HERE for all the details. Rob Chambers has also posted his materials on his GEOBYTES site: click on ...

Geography Teaching Today A new website launched today. It's jointly produced by the Geographical Association and the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) and is funded by the Action Plan for Geography. The first website to be featured was a certain GeographyPages. Geography and Peace and Quiet.. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6075774.stm Is the place where you live nice and quiet ? I live in a fairly tranquil area, but lots of places are suffering from the growing threat of noise pollution. Noel Jenkins is planning some resources on this topic. Also to come soon here are all the details of my Google Earth presentation at the SAGT Conference.

Geography and Coffee A new movie which looks like being useful for Geographers... Looks at the coffee business. Can you spot the inequalities coming up ?? OK, apart from that it's half term finally. What a half term it's been - hectic and hassled at times, but now there's time to pause - for 5 minutes anyway... Looking forward to heading up to Scotland again for the SAGT Conference.

Geography and Google Earth (Cont.) Here are 2 more images which are being hosted here to facilitate their use in 2 weeks time at the SAGT Conference in Dundee. They are the first 2 slides of my presentation at the conference, which is on the theme of GOOGLE EARTH. Look forward to seeing some of you readers there in the audience - assuming I'm ready for you all! Why not send me some of your Google Earth files. Read the posting on the SAGT Bulletin Board. Technorati Tags: SAGT06

Geography and Conferences Three weeks today, I'll be at the University of Dundee presenting at the SAGT Conference. Ollie Bray, who has his own eponymous site at http://www.olliebray.com has suggested that I tag posts on my blogs with SAGT06, so that they can be aggregated together into a Hitchhikr page . This is a BLOG aggregator: it collects posts made on blogs which contain the correct TAG. My session is based around GOOGLE EARTH, and will give some great ideas for using Google Earth in lessons - some of them are even mine ! See you there! (maybe) - Update: the tag worked and my blog was added to the Hitchhikr page... Technorati Tags: SAGT06

Geography and Music (Cont.) Spent some time today on my SAGT presentation. A Photo Jam will be used at the start, and decided it'sprobably going to be accompanied by 'Ramblin' Man' by Lemon Jelly. A visit to the website also shows that the excellent cover art from the 'Lost Horizons' CD can be seen. This is a great image for Rural-Urban interrelationships as the image shows a stylised move from Urban to Rural. You can download a Screensaver for your PC from the Lemon Jelly website. And here are some of the places that the Ramblin' Man rambles to.... I'm a ramblin' man. Paris Tibet Sydney Naxos Rangoon Rotterdam Runcton The Cayman Islands Malawi Mauritius Haight-Ashbury Patagonia Kingston Kentish Town Codrington Koh Samui Felixstowe Fingrinhoe Valmorel The North Pole Brixton Antwerp Gujarat Prawle Uganda Shennington Sudbury Sri Lanka Ecuador Edinburgh Stockholm Abu Dhabi Lexington Lindos Tokyo Harlem Ipanema Nicosia Granada San Jose Damascus Mandala...