Geography and all that Jazz

Image by Alan Parkinson - as seen in "Look at it this Way"... Details of the Geographical Association's first Post 16 National Conference are now on the GA website . This will take place in London on the 22nd of June 2010 This conference will discuss ways to enhance A-level teaching and learning through two major themes: rivers, floods and management and the impact of urban change. The workshops will include ideas for fieldwork and the use of ICT, and how to prepare students for the fieldwork examination questions. Online booking already available... There are large discounts for student GA members.

OXFAM have launched a new website called "THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE" ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. It has a range of games and quizzes featuring celebrities (some of whom you may have heard of) and, usefully, a series of downloads which include the following things below to clutter up your blog post... Your browser does not support iframes. The game is also available in a range of languages including CHINESE .... Why might that be ?

The GA Conference programme for 2010 has now been finalised by Lucy Oxley, and is available to download in various formats from the GA CONFERENCE area of the website. This year, there are a series of colour coded CPD PATHWAYS , which can be seen above, to reflect the particular personal CPD needs that teachers might have, and also certain school priorities. I will be attending a whole range of events over the course of the 3 days, and will blog more about the sessions I am involved in nearer the time. BOOKING IS NOW AVAILABLE Booking can be done in various ways... The conference price is held at 2009 prices ! There is also an EARLY BIRD BOOKING price - the early bird booking period ends on the 31st of December 2009 Free registration is available to all full-time and PGCE students. Please attach proof of your student status, e.g. photocopy of your NUS card, with your completed booking form. Online booking for students is available but proof of status will be required by email, fax or ...

Created by Recipe Star What would you taste like to a cannibal ? A question I've often asked myself - perhaps should add that to the food units I'm writing...

The Future Of Work View more documents from Jeff Brenman . A new presentation from the creator of "Thirst"... Via Simon Jones on Twitter...

After the success of the "Living Geography" events in London, York and Wrexham, a new set of dates have been released for next year. Raising the Profile of Geography in your school offers a series of workshops for Secondary teachers. This time, I will be joined by Ruth Totterdell and John Lyon as co-presenters. Full details available on the GA website by following the link above.

Unpacking the first batch of Journey Journals.... “Anything that encourages us to ‘open our eyes’, appreciate distance, difference and diversity, and the possibility of a different viewpoint is good news. Like all the best ideas the Journey Journal is simple and straightforward. I am sure children of all ages will enjoy this and gain a lot from it”. Professor David Lambert Chief Executive Geographical Association www.geography.org.uk "The ideal document for all aspiring geographers to keep alongside their passport." Dr. Nick Middleton, Geographer, writer and TV Presenter Available to order shortly from the GEOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE ONLINE SHOP. Also follow the GEOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE on TWITTER .....

The Ordnance Survey Free Maps for 11 Year Olds are arriving in schools - you may already have had yours... When you get the maps, you will also find a couple of (much sought after) hard copies of a publication called "The Language of Landscape" The booklet is supported by a series of downloads from the NATURAL ENGLAND website. I have created a SURVEY MONKEY SURVEY for those who have got their maps, and have also made use of the "Language of Landscape" to help students use the maps: whether inside or outside the classroom (or ideally both...) Click Here to take survey If you have used the maps and the book, please fill in the survey. All completed questionnaires by 1st of December will be entered into a Prize Draw to win a copy of the KS3 Teachers Toolkit title: "Look at it this Way", a copy of the Geography Collective's "Journey Journal" and a few other geographical goodies....

Spent some time yesterday with Dan Ellison pinging e-mails backwards and forwards with the rather wonderful designers at Can of Worms putting the final touches to the Journey Journal before it went off to the presses for the first print run of 3000 books. Journey Journal is a rather wonderful book for upper secondary / lower secondary age pupils. It is designed to be used when on a "journey" of some kind, perhaps as one of the millions of days which are taken as authorised absences every year, or maybe on a foreign exchange / activity / cultural trip. It's a quirky and creative way of recording the visit, and encouraging young people to take notice of their surroundings. Coming soon to an educational establishment near you. Get in touch via the GEOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE website for more details of how to order....

Many thanks to those who came along on Tuesday to the North Wales leg of the Living Geography events at the Ramada Plaza in Wrexham. The resources are mostly available at my SLIDESHARE site. Will add some more over the weekend when I get a moment... Many thanks for the contributions that were made on the day, and to Jeff Stanfield and Ruth Totterdell , my co-presenters, and Lucy Oxley for her organisation. Also good to have some celebrity endorsement of the GA's manifesto from Dr. Kennedy from "Neighbours"... Any delegates who would like further information or resources from the day, don't forget to get in touch... Coming soon: new events for 2010.

If you haven't already picked up on this from previous blog posts, Rick Cope over at GeoPacks has been posting a monthly free resource to the website HERE . These are all high quality resources, and well worth downloading. Registration with name and an e-mail is required. The latest freebie is the FIERY FINGER OF FATE which helps you pick a particular student: an alternative to Russel Tarr's excellent Class Tools SLOT MACHINE perhaps ? Thanks to Rick for his generosity...

Over to King Edward VI 5 Ways school in SW Birmingham today. A cross-country trip with more amazing weather thanks to the current high pressure. Took a tour through the southern suburbs of Birmingham thanks to my Garmin which came into its own here. Thanks to Bob Lang and Paula Cooper for the invitation and for hosting us all so well, and giving me a guided tour of the department and the school. The school is certainly a geographical "hub". It's a Humanities school with a 'Geography' specialism, a GA branch , and the centre of an RGS local network. The teaching staff include several Chartered Geographers, and the school also holds a GA Secondary Geography Quality Mark and is a Centre of Excellence. Met up with Professor Iain Stewart from Plymouth University, and a PhD student of his: Kate Donovan, who were delivering a lecture on the theme of geological hazards and their cultural references. Iain is an honorary Vice President of the GA, and also a Primary Geogra...

Stuffed and Starved Just read most of this on a train journey, and it's a great book for those teaching about issues related to food. The supporting website has a range of resources which would be useful for those wanting additional reference material, including useful related YouTube clips. On the Amazon.co.uk website you can currently " Look inside " the book... Also lots of mentions of the word geography, which is always a bonus :)

Image by Alan Parkinson, and available under Creative Commons license A conference for level 3 students of Geography, Humanities, Sociology and Health Studies. Organised by Carl Lee, and took place at the University of Sheffield. Danny Dorling and colleagues John Pritchard and Dan Vickers from SASI were present, and presented on the issue of Social Inequality, using images from WORLDMAPPER and talking about their work. The second session involved a discussion on tackling inquality. Thanks to Carl for the invitation. Carl has added a range of the resources that were used at the event to the EDEXCEL 'A' LEVEL NING. It is also worth hunting out a copy of Carl's excellent book on Sheffield: "Home: a Personal Geography of Sheffield" The SASI website features a range of very useful links for those interested in teaching and learning about social inequality. Some notes that I took in the first part of the day will hopefully be added in due course...

Check out Tony Cassidy's great new resources, which would probably be useful for encouraging creativity... The resources take the shape of a template to produce a FACEBOOK-style "profile" The profile is for a geographical context: a landform, city, development indicator, famous person, body of water... etc. The template is here: What if they had a Facebook profile? View more presentations from TonyCassidy . And followed shortly after by a TWITTER template, also produced by the inimitable Tony... Twitter Starter Template View more presentations from TonyCassidy . Quality stuff... UPDATE: Here is some fantastic work by Year 9 students from Seaford Head Community College, who used the idea in their Geography lessons with Miss Smith. I love these. Thanks for sharing. I'd love to see some other examples... Facebook and Twitter Profiles View more presentations from Liz Smith .

If you haven't already watched this programme on Teachers TV , then you really need to. And if you haven't already bought a FLIP (or similar) video then you really need to.... Paul Cornish, of the excellent GEOGRAPHER website helps a colleague from a different school to explore the use of video in the classroom . This is a wonderful resource, which includes a range of ideas for using video in the classroom, and certainly went beyond how I used it: an excellent "living" climate graph example... It led me to a new tip which I hadn't been aware of before, which provides a particularly neat method for embedding "live" YOUTUBE (or other TUBE) videos into powerpoint. Of course, this requires the videos to be hosted on a site which is accessible in school, which may be an issue for some colleagues. You need to have a live internet connection for this to work. I used a video from YouTube with very straightforward instructions (and then recursively used that sa...

Latest Shift Happens update Because it fills 5 minutes of any CPD session...

Have blogged about Jonathan Meades before, and his particular presentation style which I like... Lunchtime today was spent in the company of the first in the series "Off-Kilter", made for BBC Scotland and was about Aberdeen . I liked the look of the area known as Fitty. Towards the end, he moved on to Donald Trump and his controversial plans for a golf course in the sand dunes close to Aberdeen. He called the planned development "New Trumpton on Sea" and talked about gated communities and their absentee residents. He riffed on the idea of ' sustainability ' and how every architect and development trumpeted its sustainable credentials. New words like : "Sustain-abulous" and "Sustain-astic" ! Called it "architectural correctness"... "It's a slogan of conformist unoriginality..." "The very act of making a building is energy hungry and vastly wasteful even if the building is an eco-igloo of Fairtrade otter dropp...

The GA web team: Anne Greaves and Ben Major, have been working away for months with designers Ledgard Jepson on a new website for the Geographical Association, and it is now live , after several weeks of beta testing and tweaking. Visit the GA URL http://www.geography.org.uk to see the new site. The site looks a lot brighter, clearer and easier to navigate, and uses more of the screen’s width. Thanks to a major effort on tagging the resources, it is also easier to find things using the ‘Search’ function if they are not immediately obvious from the home page, and a new ‘Resource Finder’ should help you find something appropriate to the key stage and topic that you are interested in quickly, or items written by a particular author. A one page user guide to the new site and how it’s laid out can be downloaded by following the link (PDF download): http://www.geography.org.uk/download/GA_NewWebsiteGuide.pdf Members can also bookmark their most useful sections of the website on their...

The OS Free Maps for Schools scheme is underway once again. Schools will receive letters in September relating to the scheme. As in previous years, schools can claim a free OS Explorer 1: 25 000 map for each 11 year old pupil. This year, schools will also receive 2 copies of a booklet called "The Language of Landscapes" along with the maps, produced in assocation with Natural England and the Geographical Association.