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.
My writing project is finished. Yay!
Since forever, I’ve been writing geography resources for the new GCSE specs. This has been the reason for few Juicy Geography updates for six months. I’ve spent an astounding number of hours on this project, and now have the utmost respect for any teacher who writes in their spare time. The original brief for my work implied that I’d need about 3 hours per chapter, however it turned out that each one required around 24 solid hours of research, even before the writing started. (and I’m a very slow writer!) The project is going to be published shortly, though I’ve decided for personal reasons that I don’t wish to be credited for the work.
Here’s the whole project summed up as a Wordle (reverse engineering is not allowed!)
Finally it's all over!
Link to the full version on Wordle
I’d like to thank Massive Attack, Eels, The Good The Bad and The Queen, Johnny Cash, PJ Harvey, the Hold Steady, Goldfrapp, Beirut and Sigur Ros, as well my family for their support over the past few months. Also my editor and contacts at the publishers for being very helpful. There’s no way I’ll ever commit to a project like this again. I’m going to give all forms of blogging and writing a rest for the next few months and try to get fit again. The only extra-curricular work I’ll be involved in is my QTVR project; though I will also try and persuade my publishers to find a way to share at least some of the new ideas for GCSE with the community.
iPhones, Moab, Mont Blanc, Gibe III, BASE jumping, and the world’s largest gold mine all feature in my new GCSE resources.
During the remainder of the Easter holiday I have another few days of BBC type work to finish, as well as GCSE projects and Year 10 reports to write. Then there’s the small matter of several sets of books to mark and an INSET course I’m leading in London on the first day back at school. There’s a GCSE field trip during that week as well. Suck that up Simon Heffer and other teacher-hating correspondents. We do actually work pretty hard.
If any education publishers are reading this – I actually have got a great idea for the future of textbooks. However, I’ll keep it to myself for now -unless you want to sponsor my QTVR project!
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!
I’m sorry that files can’t be downloaded from Digital Geography at the moment. This is because I have had to take extra security measures in light of continuing problems with hacking. For a while the root folder of my web space was generously hosting an unauthorized online pharmacy, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but I didn’t get any discounts…
Juicy Geography’s Google Earth blog has been temporarily deleted, since it seemed to be the source of the problems.
If anyone needs a copy of a file, please get in touch using the contact form. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.
Update
Hopefully .doc and .kmz files can now be downloaded
Apologies, but it isn’t currently possible to contact me through the blog. If you need to get in touch please use the email noel dot jenkins at gmail.com
The problems are connected with the almost daily hacking of the blog. I’m trying to get on top of it!
Update:
I’ve spent hours going through my database, deleting all the files from my server and replacing all the core theme and plugin files to remove the persistent spam injection problem. The first sign of an attack is usually that Feedburner drops all the statistics for all the readers that use Google to subscribe. Only by viewing the source code can you see that the hack involves injecting loads of spam links into the header. With no illegal users, curious images, dodgy lines in my plugins or core files and nothing amiss with the database that I can see I’m still confused. I’ve now removed all the plugins apart from Akismet, and with a fresh install of WordPress, change of passwords and some other hardening methods I hope that the problem has been fixed.
Another update…
Normal service has been now been resumed.
Multi-talented Head of Geography and software developer Rick Cope is producing a series of free digital teaching resources on behalf of GeoPacks. The first one, on coasts is available now. Visit GeoPacks, register your details, click the free resources tab and download away. There will be a new resource available every month. It’s a fairly safe bet that these will be very popular!
I’ve written a Juicy Geography article for my GCSE students to encourage them to make a little more use of Google Earth and Maps in their coursework projects.
The ideas are very simple – maybe could be useful to some teachers?
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