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...

Just had a sneak preview of the programme for the SAGT conference , which will be held at Edinburgh Academy on the 25th of October. The keynote RSGS lecture will be given by Dr. Iain Stewart, and the Hodder Gibson lecture by record-breaking cyclist Mark Beaumont. There will also be sessions by several friends, including Val Vannet, Dan Raven Ellison, David Rayner, Ollie Bray and Christine Lloyd Staples. The theme is GEOGRAPHY AND THE MEDIA and my session (oh, did I mention that I'd be presenting for the 4th year running...) will be called TURN ON, TUNE IN, GEOGRAPHY... I'll give details on how to register as a delegate (it's a great day's CPD) later in the year. See you all there !

Was very interested in this post on Ewan McIntosh's EDUBLOGS blog , while looking for something else as it goes. The post is about BECTa's research on the use of WEB 2.0 technologies in education (and of course my interest is from the geographical angle.) Charles Crook, one of the people behind the research has been trying to get in touch with me for a good few weeks now to ask me about my use of the technologies, but something has always conspired to keep us apart. I'll try again after Easter (if you're reading this Charles, that's a promise) to try to add my two pennorth... There are plenty of interesting snippets of information in this posting. This was interesting for my media presentation at SAGT: what media do students have access to ? Access and opportunity Their first main research area revealed extensive access and opportunity to digital media. In order, from 100% down to about 10%, young people have access to: TV Mobile phone with camera Digital camera ...

Just been invited to speak at the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers (SAGT) Conference at the Edinburgh Academy in October. This will be my 4th consecutive year at the conference, having earlier presented sessions on digital learning resources, Google Earth, Blogs, Podcasting and Nings. Here is the draft title for the session: Perhaps see some of you there. I'll post the details of how to register when they come out later in the year. It's always a super conference !