2007 March Archive at Digital Geography

Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Geograph superlayer

Published

on March 15, 2007

in Google Earth, Photographs and Teaching resources

. Closed

News of a great new Google Earth layer that is UK-specific (for a refreshing change!)

Barry Hunter of the extremely useful Nearby.org.uk website has created a superlayer that displays images from the Geograph project (Creative Commons photographs that will eventually represent every square kilometer of the UK.)

The link to the layer can be found on Barry’s blog

This is what you see:

Zoom in to the concentric circles identified by OS reference letters

Camera icons appear at higher zoom levels…

…which are then replaced by picture icons ( a little slowly)

Click the picture icons to display the Geograph photo in the info balloon.

geography + information: DISTRIBUTION PROJECT

Published

Noel Jenkins

on March 12, 2007

in Asides

. Closed

Ben Schittler of Studiobenben got in touch about his project: geography + information

My name is Ben Schlitter, I’m a designer and illustrator who runs a small design company called Studiobenben. I came across your site and thought you might be interested in learning about our Geography + Information Postcards. The cards are specifically designed for the sharing of geographic details and provide a format by which people can easily exchange information they may otherwise leave out of correspondence.

Ben was kind enough to send me a sample of the postcards and I was very impressed with both the design and the underlying concept. I like the idea of giving the cards to students to take with them when they visit other countries. It would be great to build up a collection of completed cards as a display in school. The act of filling in the geographic information requires a little creativity and thought, and the results can be used in a variety of ways once the students have returned to the classroom.

The cards come as a set of 4, each one relates to a geographical theme (Climate, Population + Lifestyle, Land Water and Animals, and Industry and Resources.
The designs can be seen at Ben’s web site.

+ +

Support GGIP and the Darfur Wall
If there is sufficient demand (i.e. over 100 sets) I will make a wholesale purchase, with the aim of reducing the price (slightly) for UK teachers, while supporting the Give Geography It’s Place Campaign and the Darfur Wall. Net proceeds from the sale of the cards will be divided equally between the two organisations.

Please let me know via the contact form if you would be interested in buying some cards. Please make certain you enter your email address correctly!

I’ll evaluate the demand, and then (providing that enough orders are placed,) make a bulk purchase. Once the postcards have been shipped I will contact purchasers again and send the orders after payment has been received. Payment will be via PayPal. I will arrange for independent auditing and verification of the charitable donation.

Orders must be placed by 22/3/07. UK orders only.

Please support this idea if you can. A minimum of 5 sets of postcards would be good!

Prices:
1 set = Â£2.50
5 sets = Â£11.00 (Â£2.20 per set)
10 sets = 20.00 Â£2.00 per set)

Contact me to pre-place an order.

Peer assessment between schools

Published

Noel Jenkins

on March 10, 2007

in Student work and video

. 2 Comments

I’m grateful to Melanie Richards and her Year 7 students who took part in a peer assessment of some work on urban models. The interesting dimension to this activity is that I haven’t met Melanie, and I don’t know anything about her school or her students, other than they seem very keen on Geography.

The exercise that we planned, via mutual postings on our respective school blogs, Georgeous Geography and Noel Jenkins @ Court Fields involved the peer assessment of urban models by Year 7 (students are 11/12 years old)

Having set the task for homework, we posted pictures of some of the best examples of the models on our blogs and then got students to peer assess them. This was done by getting students to record their thoughts, and adding the recordings to pictures of the work, using Window Movie Maker. The results can be downloaded from the following links, if the embedded You Tube clips below are filtered by your network!

Download video made by St Ursula’s, Greenwich, London

Download video made by Court Fields Community School, Wellington, Somerset

Neither group of students were guided in what to say, yet the responses were overwhelmingly supportive. Possibly, had we established assessment criteria, the peer assessment would have been more thorough, however this was a first attempt.

I think the experiment worked really well. The students felt their work was valued, and in the case of Court Fields school, they believed that that the St Ursula’s class were in a particularly good position to assess their work, since they live in a large city.

Thanks very much to Ms Richards and the Georgeous Geography blog. I hope we can repeat the assessment next year.

Literary Geography: Using Google Earth to investigate Svalbard, the setting for Northern Lights.

Published

Noel Jenkins

on March 10, 2007

in Google Earth, Google Earth lessons and Teaching resources

. Closed

I have written up a new Google Earth teaching idea that combines a study of the modern classic Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, with an investigation of Svalbard, one of the settings for the book. The book is published in the USA as The Golden Compass.

aurora
source: Wikipedia

Students act as location-scouts, examining the terrain in Google Earth and adding placemarks to indicate where they would film the various action sequences.