A psycho-geography project by year 8. Following some questionnaire research that established that some people in the local community were a bit negative about the town, we made a simple sign and persuaded shop-keepers to display it. Most were really happy to do so. This was a nice project - the idea that places affect our emotions is such an easy one to grasp. Ironically all young people are banned from the shops at lunch times! Some of the photos are displayed below - using Splashr and this Flickr set.
Archive for the 'Student work' Category
Not the best week for Geography with the media and Ofsted doing their very best to ignore some of the tremendous progress that has been made over the past year, for example the revisions to the national curriculum, and the Action Plan.
I was cheered up by this example of student work:
click to enlarge
I’ve created a wikispace for a new project on Personal Geographies. The idea is that Year 8 students will plan, discuss and write up their local fieldwork projects on the wiki. All the projects are based on the student’s perceptions of the local area and they have come up with some very interesting ideas. I’m able to use the wiki to add suitable guidance materials and comments on the work in progress; hopefully other teachers and parents will be able to discuss the work as it develops.
The project is an attempt at teaching with a co-constructivist approach. I’m hoping that the use of the wiki and web 2.0 tools such as Flickr and Google My Maps will mean that students collaborate with each other and work on the project out of school hours. They are being encouraged to use their mobile phones to take pictures and video, and hopefully they’ll learn some valuable new ICT skills that they can apply to a real world context. I’m using wikispaces because of the level of support they offer teachers.
There is a little risk involved, partly in terms of how colleagues might percieve the “geography” of the work. I could not have predicted that a group of students would have chosen to investigate locations for a fashion photoshoot or that others would be identifying the site for a new theatre space. One group of boys are creating a Parkour map of the town. There are a few stipulations, the students have to produce a map and collect and process some primary data as part of the outcome.
Let me know if you’d like to join the wiki.
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.
It was great to see SLN user Melanie Richards using the photographs of my Year 7 homework to inspire her own students. This is precisely why I continue with the whole blogging lark! Melanie posted an excellent video on You Tube. Her blog Gorgeous Geography is here.
Nice to see an example of social constructivism from teacher David Rogers who has posted presentations from his class on Slideshare for others to read and comment on.
[Slideshare presentation now removed]
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