Bill Bryson on National Parks

We'll be using some of Bill's work with Year 7

National Parks VR Video

You'll need your Google Cardboard for this…

Plastic microbeads

They are apparently going to be banned... We will explore these in Year 8.

Flight of the Swans

We will be following this at the start of the new academic year...
 


WWT Flight of the Swans from WWT on Vimeo.

Bewick's Swans are in decline, and this journey will follow the migration of the swans by paramotor, from Russia to Slimbridge.

Follow the voyage on Twitter

Cambridge Ideas

Thanks to Perse Geography on Twitter for sharing some Cambridge Festival of Ideas sessions that should be of interest to Geographers.

Read the full programme here (PDF download)

Should be of interest to King's Ely 6th formers in particular...

Subvertisement booklet - coming to Year 8...

A YouTube video showing the subvertisement workshop which we will be using later in the year with Year 8 students. I helped with a few of the final elements of the booklet.
Great work by Eeva and Ian.

Coming soon to King's Ely Geography... Do It Kits...

Mr. Parkinson's Mission:Explore colleague Helen is behind a company called Do it Kits.
She's been making a range of exciting and interesting kits for schools, which have an Arduino (or similar) board at their heart.
Helen's latest kit is currently being made, and laser cut, and the good news is that we are going to be having some to play with at King's, and be using them in the Geography department (and perhaps with the Geography Explorers' Club sessions)
We'll be using them to explore microclimates on the school site, of which there are quite a few, and trialling them.... as part of our Year 7 work.
Here's an image of the kits in Helen's workshop....
We'll be sharing what we do with them here...

The Invention of Nature

This is my current reading. It's also one of the last books that I added to the shelves of the GeoLibrary. It's a biography of Alexander von Humboldt.
THE INVENTION OF NATURE from Sea Blue Media on Vimeo.

It also has an accompanying StoryMap made by the ESRI team using the Cascade app...

Olympics Mapping - overlaid on King's...

The BBC Dimensions site was a very useful site. It showed the position of historical events overlaid on maps of your choice, so that you could investigate how big some events really were e.g. the base of the pyramids, or the area of the moon that was explored by the Apollo astronauts.

This NY Times site has been added for the Olympics. I wonder how long it will be around after the event?

You can see how far certain Olympic events would be when compared to maps in the background.

Here's a couple...

Media literacy and geographies of consumption

Here's the latest resource that I have worked on (a little - I gave some guidance on the contents and Finnish translation and activities)

It's been developed by Eeva Kemppainen and Ian Cook, who I've worked with previously.

Developed for Pro-Ethical Trade Finland

This guide sets out an approach to teaching media literacy and the geographies of consumption that has been developed by the NGO Pro Ethical Trade Finland (Eettisen kaupan puolesta ry), with funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland.
A subvertisement workshop involves interpreting and subverting the messages made in product advertising.
With their teachers, students are shown how to critically read advertisements brought into the classroom and encouraged to work out:
• How images and texts are designed to convey a message about a commodity
• How advertisements convey relationships between people, places and things
• What claims advertisements make about the origins and uses of commodities and what information and imagery is missing
• How advertisements can be altered to convey alternative messages
• How and where subvertisements can encourage critical readings of advertisements?

Children and young people are bombarded by diverse commercial messages on social media, on the street, on TV, in movies and in games. Teachers can help students to learn the differences between journalism and marketing as well as develop their capacity to critically interpret what they see and hear.

Would be useful for Cultural Geographers and also connections with Changing Places units as well.

You can download a copy of the whole guide in English (unless you want it in Finnish) as a PDF file.

For more on the previous work that I have done with Ian and Eeva check out the Follow the Things education page.

Global Ecosystems StoryMap

Brazil Olympics 2016

We hope that all KEJ geographers are watching the Olympics, and keeping an eye on their atlas, and working out where the competing nations are from… 

Where is Fiji for example? They won their first Olympic medal yesterday in the Rugby 7s….

Geography on foot...

An interesting article in the Geographical Magazine.

It suggests that walking and exploring your local area is at the heart of all geographical study.
We do a fair bit of walking at King's, but perhaps need to do a little more of it…

Where was the last place you walked to?

Geography is a vigorous discipline, with no real need to justify itself.

Modern human geography is a powerful analytical tool. Physical geography, with its abandonment of Penckian and Davisian concepts has become perhaps more descriptive of phenomena. Geography is also a synthesising discipline and in synthesis unites both aspects of the subject. A study of landscape reveals the fundamental geology, the pedology, the biology (including lichenology), microclimatology, history, and sociology. This can all be achieved by a study of the local area on foot.

It is therefore advocated that all geographical teaching should begin with a study of the immediate vicinity on foot. As in Pestalozzian theory this should commence in the junior school and continue in later education. By so doing the two halves of the subject are reunited. For the individual the learning process is enhanced, and they are given the opportunity to establish a link with the genius loci, to have roots and to belong.

A song for the rain forests

Crystal Serenity - new for the Pole to Pole unit

Countdown to Crystal Serenity: The 1 per cent are coming to Canada’s Arctic https://t.co/616MkOUUsr via @macleansmag pic.twitter.com/RpJ1CEzTWf

— Jane George (@sikugirl) July 19, 2016

This post has been in draft for a couple of months, and the story has evolved since it was first announced. This would now be a useful idea for exploring fragile cold environments.

I'm going to try to develop this as an evolved case study piece, but ran out of time… will come back to this I think

I've just read a Jonathan Franzen piece on Antarctica in the Times which was excellent and worth hunting out...

The Crystal Serenity is a large cruise ship, which is going to boldly go on a voyage this summer, setting off in August 2016… and it's one that all geographers should be fascinated by. The ship is going to sail around the north of Canada, and go through what would have been referred to in the past as the Northwest Passage.
The ship's website has a range of detail on the voyage, which includes the itinerary and the route that the ship is going to take. I won't put it here due to copyright, but it's well worth hunting out and taking a look.

The voyage is rather expensive too (at over $20 000 per person), as all Polar voyages are, and apparently all the places have been booked.

This has attracted a lot of interest given the size of the ship, and also the nature of the voyage, which is a commercial voyage through an area which is being changed by human activity, and the ship may well cause other interruptions to daily life for people who live in the area.

The ship will be accompanied on the voyage by the BAS ship Sir Ernest Shackleton.
This has a heavily armoured hull which can withstand ice, and will also be able to have a
range of additional equipment and potentially help with an evacuation if there is a problem with the cruise ship. There has been some criticism of a scientific ship being used in this way.
There is a Canadian radio show here which includes a useful 30 minute report on the proposed voyage, although it won't be there for ever.

The Guardian has published an article on the voyage, which provides some useful additional information.

However, Klaus Dodds, who specialises in geopolitics has pointed out that there are lots of different perspectives at play in the Arctic, and this is just one of them. This is excellent on how Nunavut and Cambridge Bay is preparing for the visit.

And via Twitter, I came across a useful few tweets with ideas that are relevant, including from people living in the area.

A Pew Trust research report also contains some very useful diagrams and data on the growing changes in the Arctic.

There's a splendid infographic on this National Post article.

And finally, there was a report published recently on the sustainability credentials of cruise holidays, and the impact of these large ships on the sea through which they sail.

PokemonGo Geography ideas

Pokemon Geography ideas collated on Google Drive