I’ve just completed a new resource on the diamond trade. The resource uses Google Earth to locate some excellent images by Kadir Van Lohuizen.
The latest high resolution coverage of parts of West Africa allows students to find evidence of alluvial diamond mining.
Alluvial diamond mining, Sierra Leone
Using Google Earth, students can trace the journey that a diamond might make across the world, estimating the total distance travelled. I’ve made several suggestions for other teaching activities.
I’m very happy to host submitted teaching resources for this topic, and comments are welcomed. My thanks to Kadir Van Lohuizen, Sally Hindley, Tony Cassidy and Mike Jones for their help with this resource.
Rowenna Davis of Hands Up for Peace and Messengers fame has left university and is travelling with Jon Mollinari through the States and into South America. The two are completing a personal project to record how attitudes to US state policies change as they travel south. Rowenna’s eye for a human interest story and Jon’s capacity for mischief should ensure that their From North to South blog is interesting reading for the next few months!
The summer is fast approaching and it’s time for some active citizenship. I’m going to unleash a group of Year 9 students to make a film about wind energy in Devon, focussing particularly on the Batsworthy Cross site that generated an interesting debate in this blog.
The students will have complete creative control; researching, filming directing and editing the film themselves. It will be fascinating to see what conclusions they come up with.
Please get in touch if you live locally and feel like sharing your views on camera. We are aiming to complete the filming during July and can be quite flexible over times and dates.
The results of the fantasy architecture competition mentioned in the previous post have been announced, and the Spiral Tower by James was declared the winner. Digitally distributed environments has more details about the project.
The Triplet Tower, the Eco Flower and the Spiral Tower.
Congratulations to all the Year 7 students who took part, and thanks again to Dr Hudson-Smith of UCL for providing the opportunity.
I’m very grateful to Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith of digitally distributed environments for the opportunity given to a class of Year 7 students to design a fantasy building for London. Three of the winning drawings will be modelled in 3D by the team at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, ready to be imported into Google Earth.
One of the submitted designs
Look out for SketchUp. Recently acquired by Google, this software is ideal for adding 3D models to Google Earth. A free license is available for teachers, and there’s a lot of scope for cross-curriculular work with ICT and Design Technology.
Last week I spontaneously decided that it would be a good idea to film some students talking about their homework. I recorded the video on my mobile phone and converted the file into .avi format using Xilisoft 3GP video converter.
Subsequently, I’ve felt that this is a really good way of assessing work. Because the students themselves aren’t in the frame (an important point), they focus on describing their homework. Their understanding is evident, and a collection of short videos like these may be a useful tool when demonstating their progess to a sceptical Ofsted inspector.
I got some Year 10 students to talk about the Year 7’s work today and filmed them in the same way. There were two reasons. Firstly I thought it would be an interesting form of assessment for learning, because the Year 7 students would be able to see how other pupils interpreted their work, and consequently how to improve it. Year 10s got the opportunity to revise some of their work on settlement.
I’ve briefly edited the videos in Windows Movie Maker and the results are available to download below:
Year 7 talk about their work (9.4mb wmv)
Year 10 talk about Year 7 work (4.1mb wmv)
The files play in Windows Media Player, and because of the limitations of the recording device, you may need to turn up the sound on your speakers.
Recent Comments