A class of (very) mixed ability year 8 students have begun work on my San Francisco decision-making exercise.
After the first session they have come up with some suggested sites for a new hospital, designed to be safe from earthquakes. Download the file here
The original lesson resource is here
Next lesson we will have a little peer assessment and the opportunity to improve and refine their decisions.
Any feedback is most welcome and will be passed to the students.
This excellent little script is working again. Go to FlickrFly site.
Simply add a tiny snippet of code to a description of a geotagged photo in Flickr, and on clicking the newly created link, you fly to that location in Google Earth.
Here is an example of a photograph tagged with Flickr Fly Click “Fly to this location” to see the effect. You need Google Earth installed obviously!
Since moving away from London, I’d forgottten about the Yellow Arrow project. Although the concept was born in 2004, it is still very much part of the zeitgeist, and a recent investigation into Semipedia see post, together with my impending smart phone purchase (this week!) prompted a quick post.
Yellow Arrow describes itself as a “Massively Authored Artistic Production” or MAAP, according to the website. It’s a spatial anotation project, the aim being to tag features of interest with a yellow arrow sticker bearing a unique code. When someone finds the arrow, they text the code and receive back a message, about that location. In some cities, the yellow arrows form an unconventional tour through parts of the landscape that would be hidden from non-locals - creating a geographical adventure by text.
photo by Stillben
Potentially, Yellow Arrow would make a unique local study. Where would students place the arrows? What would the messages be?
A subversive, graffitti-based local place study, linking the virtual and human environment? It really sounds like my next fieldwork project! No seriously…
Flyer is a great little web application to store in your bookmarks. Click this link to try it out. Basically it searches for geotagged images and displays them in Google Earth or a Google Map. You can search by title or tags. For example, typing the tag “landslide” should take you to some of my pictures at Charmouth.
The geotags for this location are a little inaccurate and when geoblogggers is back, I’ll sort them out.
Thanks to a recent post at SLN, I’ve discovered Maplecroft Maps. This is a remarkable site that serves up attractive, interactive maps on a variety of environmental, social, economic and polictical themes.
Close analysis of the data is encouraged; one can overlay maps in order to discern relationships between data sets, and a hotspot icon draws attention to critical information.
The maps examine the response of business and government to the various issues, and icons describe cases of particularly good, or by contrast, poor examples of corporate responsibility.
The site will appeal across the KS3/4 geography curriculum, particularly for more able students with an inquisitive nature, and should be indispensible to A level students looking for material on sustainable development.
I’ve made a quick Google Earth overlay that might be useful for teachers who use Montserrat as a case study. The overlay shows the hazard map produced by the Montserrat Volcano Observatory It would complement the activities in both Geog.1 and EarthWorks 3 textbooks.
Click to enlarge
The Google Earth image shows the lava flows that have extended the coastline in a couple of areas and postdate the hazard map. More information and a picture here.
For several years I have enjoyed successful lessons getting students to create their own hazard map of the island, in response to a series of short text reports about the eruption. At the end of the lesson they compare their maps with the version from the overlay, to see how well they would have managed the situation.
click to enlarge
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