Geography and all that Jazz

AR stands for 'Augmented Reality' The AR SIGHTS: I first saw the idea of 'augmented reality' some 4 years ago, when working at the Royal Geographical Society, and there was a presentation by the Ordnance Survey, who showed the technique in action with some headsets and hand held devices. Just been having a play with the AR SIGHTS website: a 'Twitter' tip-off.... The idea is that you install an application which connects with Google Earth . Located around the world are some iconic buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, Pyramids of Giza and Sydney Opera House. Once installed, a sheet with a special image is downloaded and printed off. This is then placed in front of a web-cam, and instead of the image, a 3D model of the building appears to 'sit' on the sheet of paper, and can be rotated and looked at from various angles. Thanks to Ollie Bray for the useful demo video on BLIP TV which shows it in action...

iPhone in Geography Education Could this just be the best new piece of technology that is available for geography teachers ? A growing number of geography teachers are discovering the joys of the iPhone. Increasingly, the ways that they use them in their geography lessons and fieldwork are also being added to blogs and other online materials, perhaps because teachers who own iPhones are more inclined to use technology in their teaching ? Some examples of teachers who are using this include Ollie Bray , who has posted a series of useful tutorials on how he uses particular apps for the iPhone. I would also recommend John Davitt 's iPhone app: the RANDOM ACTIVITY GENERATOR , which is demonstrated here... Do you have an iPhone ? Do you use it in your teaching ? Please get in touch...

An excellent TES article by Ollie Bray looking at a lesson that he has taught every year since starting to teach on the development of settlements. This has now evolved to include an element of ICT to add an extra dimension. Check it out ! Building Your Own Town View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: geography olliebray ) Nice work.

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...

In a slightly recursive way, this blog post is a blog post about a blog post which features me and my blog posts... and also my new post... Thanks to Ollie Bray for his kind words on his blog about my new job, and the "new vision" On the Single Malt front, my bottle of Ardbeg Correyvreckan has been delayed, but I hope to get hold of it soon: perhaps in time for some celebratory drams. I'll bring the last bit up to the SLF, Ollie. Just back from a quick trip down to Rochester and the Royal Naval Dockyards at Chatham, where I went with fellow "Pie Society" colleagues today. The weather was kind - thanks to "the Major" for driving the landship down... Caught up with some nice ales from the NELSON BREWERY . I like the tagline: "England expects every man to drink our beer"... Here's a few piccies from the day... Update: Ardbeg arrived safely...

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...

Sim City for DS Went out to the supermarket yesterday evening (dodging the rain in Hunstanton) and as well as some rather nice Scottish strawberries I also got Sim City for the Nintendo DS. My daugher got her pink Nintendo about 5 weeks ago after saving up for ages, and I was inspired by Ollie Bray , who has posted several times on his weblog about the value of educational games (I even have a GeoGames page on GeographyPages) So we came to a deal: I can borrow her DS to play the game, and she gets to play it too... Everyone's a winner. It looks like I might have bought a good 'un. This game was apparently a major success in Japan when it was launched, and I read a 5 star review in the Independent this morning. The twin screens on the DS are used to good effect here, as one is used for the city view and one is used for the general management. We are currently building the city of LYNNY. I'll keep you posted on how I do.

New Ollie stuff... Just planning a session for the University of Cambridge in a few weeks time (stepping in for Rob Chambers) and some nice ideas here from Ollie Bray...

Thanks to Ollie Bray for guiding me to this Slideshare presentation comparing the USA, India and China, and looking at global shift and the impact of China and India's huge populations on a future global economy.

Quick post to flag up a few things... a) Ollie Bray's excellent Slideshare on ICT in Geography b) Melanie Richards' useful post providing links to today's excellent Guardian pullout on Rural Communities - very useful for A2 Rural-Urban work. c) Tomorrow is WORLD WATER DAY Some very useful resources including FLASH ANIMATIONS at the 2007 WWD site . Theme is water scarcity with a focus on how global warming is threatening communities, who rely on glaciers for their water supply... Just been on the budget calculator on the BBC News website (what do you mean, you didn't know it was Budget Day....) The result: Next year, the indications are that you will be £197.27 better off. Cheers Gordon (I think...)

Geography and YouTube This will not be viewable if you're looking at this at school as it's filtered out. It's a video made to accompany a track by Eric Prydz and featuring a sample from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" - some good parkour and a message at the end - and all in moody black and white to save colour... Thanks to Tony Cassidy for bringing it to my attention. UPDATE Just a few hours after that video was posted, Ollie Bray brought another video to my attention. This one features the same music track, but different images.

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 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