Since August, I’ve pushed blogging and other forms of time-wasting activities firmly to one side and dedicated myself to a series of adventures in hidden places. Every weekend has been a new experience, learning new skills and going deeper and further into the hidden parts of the built environment that surrounds us. It’s a simple, yet hugely fulfilling activity, filled with remarkable characters and stories, risks and rewards. This Flickr River stream randomly serves up a taster of some of the places I’ve been:
The hobby has benefited both History and Geography lessons. This weekend we visited a hidden deep shelter, built to house 2,500 people during WW2. It was a surreal time walk:
I made this video for a local teacher (I had the song going around my head while exploring the shelter) Others might also find it useful:
The Google Chart Creator by Jim Allen is a nice front end for the Google Chart API that is capable of making a wide variety of graphs, including QR codes. The results can be inserted into other web pages or for example Google Earth placemarks. Some schools will prevent students from accessing Google Docs, so this little application makes a good work-around.
Information Aesthetics mentions an audio-visual work called Bella Gaia, directed by Kenji Williams that animates satellite imagery and spatial data. The production makes use of NASA’s World Wind virtual globe and might be useful as an introduction to a lesson on remote sensing.
These images will be added to my geographical panoramas page at Juicy Geography. I’ve managed to wear out my trusty tripod and need to buy a new one – so the usual plea about not embedding etc, without a donation applies. I’m working on an alternative way of displaying these images with more features, and without the distracting thumbnails when viewing at full screen.
I couldn’t attend the most recent geography Flash Meeting but it served up another great slice of CPD. One outcome has been Kenny O’Donnell’s creation of a Spotify playlist for Geography – related songs while Jerry Swiatek added a Google spreadsheet to collate further ideas. Visit the Geog FM Music page to contribute.
I was stunned by the robotic technology in use at the neighbouring farm. The cows decide when to be milked! Great for a GCSE case study on agricultural changes:
Thanks to a really nice tweet from Simon Renshaw, and input from Mark Ollis and others on Twitter, I’ve accelerated the new version of my Web 2.0 toolkit specifically for geography teachers. There’s a lot of updates to this version, and I’m quite pleased with it.
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