Digital Geography

Some brief updates and news…

Action Aid contacted me with news about an interesting free online resource called 20 Years of Chembakolli. More details below:

ActionAid has worked very closely with the tribal people of south India for many years, initially supporting them to fight for rights to their ancestral land, and in subsequent years in producing a range of Key Stage 2 resources for UK primary schools. The QCA even built up a scheme of work around ‘A village in India’ making explicit reference to our resources.

Join the March

We’ve launched a free online march to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the land rights marches that helped the Adivasis secure the rights to their land. The march allows teachers and pupils to join the march themselves and send a message of support to the Adivasis. It also allows them to explore the landscapes of Gudalur and, closer to the actual anniversary, the village of Chembakolli. They can click on buildings, objects and people to see photographs and learn more about life in south India.

Thanks to Adam Brewer who has contributed a really fun “Kung Fu” activity to Juicy Geography that is guaranteed to enliven the teaching of plate tectonics!

The Vendee Globe race is proving very popular among my Year 7, who won’t settle down until they’ve plotted their chosen skipper on their tracking maps. The Vendee Globe site hosts daily videos and podcasts and the key page for checking the current position of the boats is here. (Relating to a recent post)

Great news for 360 cities.net - their panoramic content now appears as a layer in Google Earth. Usually I rely on Google Earth blog for this kind of update, but I noticed it yesterday while running a Google Earth training course. I’m convinced it wasn’t there in the morning, but appeared just after I’d demonstrated the site to the participants. (related post)

Some iPhone news. The 2.2 update has arived. Lots of grumbling from some blogs that the update doesn’t feature cut and paste, Flash, voice guidance, toast making or world peace, however it does bring Street View to the platform. I’m finding my phone incredibly useful in the classroom, really just for the simple things - music, the decibel meter and the brilliantly simple stop watch for games such as Just a Minute. I use Maps, Evernote, Remember the Milk, Fizz Weather every day, and I still don’t care that the camera is useless and there’s no video. For the benefit of anyone accessing Digital Geography with an iPhone, I’ve installed the wpTouch plugin which renders the site super-efficiently like this:

Finally - it’s been two weeks since the very last malicious script was discovered and removed from my web server and no subsequent hacks - yay!