I dreamed of David again...

I blogged a few weeks ago about the success of David Rogers: the Chair of the GA's Secondary Committee in the Jamie Oliver Dream Teachers competition on YouTube...
You can watch his £10 000 winning video below - it's now been seen over 13000 times !



Also listen to him from earlier today on BBC Radio SOLENT - via Audioboo....



David is off to Google London today for an awards ceremony so have a good day David....

Food: another helping...

GA subscribers to Teaching Geography have the chance to use a really well put together unit of work which has been written by Suzie Farmer.
It is called "Planning for Progression: making sense of famine and feast" and explores issues of food production.
There are downloadable documents on the GA website which accompany the article.

BBC report earlier this week looked at the contents of an FAO report also identified the shocking figure that a third of the world's food is wasted...

Image: Alan Parkinson


Click to download Tim Hess's excellent GA Conference presentation on the water that is involved in food production too.

http://geography.org.uk/download/GA_Conf11Hess.pdf (PDF download)

What I bought at the supermarket...

For a food-related project I'm planning...
Everything I bought on my last trip to the supermarket.... (I went to Waitrose on this occasion, but normally go a lot more down-market...)


Could be used to explore issues like:

- sourcing: local or worldwide
- production methods: freedom foods, organic, Red Tractor, PGI
- packaging
- health: convenience or home cooking ingredients
- seasonality (they were bought in May... which of them are "out of season")

Other ideas, please add them below...

Oh, and I forgot the kitchen roll...

South Downs National Park

All schools that lie within the newly designated South Downs National Park will soon receive an education pack which was put together by the Geographical Association.
It features a range of activities to explore the geography of the National Park, and the idea of landscape as a palimpsest...
It matches nicely with some of the ideas in my KS3 Toolkit: "Look at it this Way", which is available from the GA's online shop.

The pack will also be available to download from the South Downs website from Monday 16th of May....

GA Online CPD Courses

You have a chance to book to take part in the first of the Geographical Association's new ONLINE CPD courses.
These use a special web interface to allow you to listen to the presenter, watch a range of images and resources, and carry out a range of tasks, as well as asking and answering questions and taking part in discussions.


You can find more information about how the courses will work here.

Health and Flooding

24 June 2011

Audience:    Post-16 geography teachers
Time:            Friday 24 June from 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Venue:         Online training room - take part from anywhere in the world
Cost:             £125 (GA full, personal and concessionary members) / £175 (non-members)

Course information

The first in our series of interactive online courses will help Post-16 teachers update their knowledge of health and flooding, two key topics in Post-16 geography.

Approximately one hour will be spent on each topic during which time you will learn about current thinking and discover recent examples to use as case studies with your students.

Health

• Links between geography and health
• Global patterns of health
• Health issues linked to infectious diseases, including updates on HIV-AIDS
• Health issues linked to affluence and human behaviour

Flooding

• Causes of recent floods
• Impacts of recent floods
• The implications of these for thinking about flood management

The course will include examples from titles in the GA's Top Spec Geography series -Flood Risk and Management and Health Issues in Geography.

Course leaders

Bob Digby: Junior Vice-President and Community Geographer for the Geographical Association, GCSE Principal Examiner, author, and education consultant

Dave Holmes: Geography teacher at Queen's School, Taunton, GCSE and GCE Principal Examiner, author, and education consultant

The importance of "planning" your lessons...

There's a lot of unambitious geography around...
Noel Jenkins has never been guilty of that.
His geography has always pushed the boundaries, and developed critical and creative thinking in the students fortunate enough to have him as their teacher.

His latest project is a genius piece of guerilla geography and place-based geography, which re-invents the idea of  pupil participation in the planning process, and the idea of 'localism', as well as local geographies, urban geography and local map skills.

WELLINGTON PLANNING hosts information about some proposed planning decisions that Noel and students have developed.
They are proposed changes to buildings in Wellington, Somerset.

Here, for example, is the planning notice for Waitrose: this will be turned into an alternative usage...

The proposed changes have been developed with local knowledge very much in mind, and that adds an extra dimension to the project.
There have apparently been some "interesting responses" from people who have come across the notices.

Nice work Noel - provocative and inspirational as always !

Weatherspark

Via @NCGE1915 on Twitter

Weatherspark visualises weather data from a weather station over time...

Here's the data for SHEFFIELD (home of the GA) for example...

Using the top tabs, you can visualise a whole week, month or year's weather...

You can also see detail about each day, going back in time for years....

There is information on temperatures, cloud cover and rainfall of varying intensity...

A wealth of data to mine in lots of creative ways...
There are details from numerous locations all over the world...

Check the Weatherspark page for more of the options.
The service is also in BETA, so you can make suggestions and watch it develop over time....


My website of the week.... and will go into the next GA Magazine WEBWATCH - watch out for the conference special edition coming soon...