Tony Cassidy continues to flow with the zeitgeist and has started a new collaborative presentation on Geography gaming. I really enjoyed contributing as it gave me the opportunity to hunt back through my delicious bookmarks to search for some forgetten gems. The presentation has already reached maturity in just a couple of days!
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
A quick for Mark Warner’s Ideas To Inspire mini-site. Collaborative presentations of good teaching ideas contributed by educators around the world have been neatly organized into a really useful reference resource that’s bound to grow over time. Cheers Mark!
The personal geographies project outlined in part 1 of this post has now been published.
Setting up the website:
While the students have been busy creating their stories, I’ve been experimenting with the best way of publishing their work, given the constraints of a filtered network and the e-safety imperative. Originally the plan was to publish the stories on Posterous as this site isn’t filtered (yet) and it offers the advantage of overwhelming simplicity. However it didn’t seem to work well in school (an IE6 issue?) and it doesn’t support the embedding of Google Maps. I was also attracted towards Google Sites because many of the students have Google accounts, and it would have been easy for them to contribute and edit their work and manage photos and video from within the Google network. I wanted members of the public to be able to comment on the students work, but niether Posterous nor Google Sites feature comment moderation, so I looked elsewhere for a solution. I’ve settled on a WordPress.com blog – with just one post on the home page and the rest of the content published as pages. It’s not ideal – for example there’s no point in subscribing to the RSS feed, but it’s easy to manage comments and embedded content, and hopefully I’ll be able to give some of the students authoring rights. The project site is located at Wellington Stories.
The stories:
The students are busy creating their stories and many have opted to use photos and video. In order to sustain momentum, I got them to produce a short placeholder story for their individual page. Each story gets it’s own page on the blog, a unique QR code, and a placemark on a Google My Map.

View Wellington Stories in a larger map
I was delighted with the placeholder stories which are short, funny and completely immersed in local place. Try a sample – the poignant My Story of Woolworths, and a response to antisocial behaviour: A tree caught on fire are good introductions.
Next steps:
During the course of next week students will start tagging the physical locations of the stories with QR codes and we’ll start a photographic record of the project. We’ll also start uploading some of the more detailed multimedia work and the local paper will be contacted in order to encourage people to download a QR code reader.
Please visit Wellington Stories and drop the students a comment or two!
There’s an archive of yesterday’s meeting on the Geography FM wiki. We discussed the Secondary Quality Geography Mark and Chartered Geographer initiatives, as well as using Google Docs for collaboration and the idea of an Open Source textbook.
New participants are very welcome. The next meeting is Thursday 21st May. To take part please request permission to edit the wiki. Then add your name to the list of attendees.
I’ve created a Google Docs presentation to generate some ideas for using GIS in the classroom. Please get in touch if you’d like to help out. You’ll need to create a Google account first. I’m looking for ideas for both primary and secondary classrooms. Inspiration of course comes from Tom Barrett’s ‘Interesting Ways to..’ series of presentations, while more generic ideas are being collated in Tony Cassidy’s 101 creatively simple ways to teach Geography.
I was fascinated by the impact of a few scarecrows on the village of Awliscombe. A strange mix of art and tradition – and an opportunity to tease the local characters.
I doubt that the villagers see themselves as public geographers, but there were plenty of interesting statements. Here’s a video of some of the best creations:
scarecrows from Noel Jenkins on Vimeo.
Many thanks to Tony Cassidy for initiating a Google Docs collaboration for geography teaching ideas in the style of Tom Barrett’s “Interesting ways to”
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