Tag Archive for 'Teaching_resources'

Interactive climate map / graph drawing in Excel

This interactive world map simply pops up a climate graph as the mouse is rolled over the hotspots. How useful is that?

climate map

It’s a simple and effective idea for introducing students to climate graphs.

Guides to graph drawing with Excel (inlcuding a suggested method for producing climate graphs) can be found at Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Google / Gapminder collaboration

Thanks to Education/Technology blog for news that Google is collaborating with the Gapminder organization to produce a web based version of their development data visualization tool, previously available as as standalone application. It’s in beta at the moment and can be found here.

gapminder

Population gazetteer

I discovered the World Gazetteer of population of towns and cities.

The data can be conveniently downloaded as a Google Earth file which opens a placemark with the data in the balloon as shown:

circle population click to enlarge

A very useful resource, whether or not the Google Earth feature is used. A related post can be found at my Google Earth blog.

Shaded relief mashup

Jon Parker wrote with information about his new map project, that mashes Google Maps with custom tiles showing the world in shaded relief. It’s a really nice piece of work, that represents topography very clearly.

shaded relief

Visit www.shaded-relief.com and have a look.

New resource for teaching about flooding

Rich Allaway has created another mini-site, this time comparing the flooding events at Boscastle and Lynmouth. Targetted at KS3 and also AS level, the resource makes great use of technologies such as Live Local, Google Earth and a new Site Pal character, “Walter Falls”
floodpal

Rich has included a long and varied collection of resources, as well as pupil and teacher notes. Excellent effort!

Would you like a volcano PowerPoint?

A PowerPoint describing volcanic environments. SlideShare version below:
[Slideshare presentation now removed]

Or download the original PowerPoint with animation preserved

New blog for my students

I’ve been very slow off the mark in blogging for/with my own students, compared to many of my online teacher friends and colleagues. That’s set to change with a new blog:

njblog

I’m going to use the blog in three ways. Firstly to link to various online materials that could be interesting or useful to the students. Secondly, I’d like to host some examples of student work. Finally, I’m hoping that it will provide an opportunity for those dialogues that could/should take place outside the classroom but never actually materialize. For example the comments could be used to discuss matters arising from homework assignments, examinations or current affairs. I guess we shall see.