Year 9 Conflict Assessment

Geographies of Conflict Assessment by GeoBlogs on Scribd

VLE Books

You should have had an e-mail from Dr Jones at the Porta. We have a subscription to VLe Books, which offers thousands of books available as downloads or for reading on the screen. There are hundreds of books for GEOGRAPHY: travel writing, textbooks and a whole range of others.

Bear Grylls Endeavour Task

We used this during the week to bring the Adventure Landscapes unit to a close.

Bear Grylls Endeavour Task by GeoBlogs on Scribd

UNICEF

Thanks to our visitor from UNICEF for visiting our KEJ assembly this week and collecting the cheque for the £13,866 that we raised last year, and which the government will match-fund for even greater impact. She explained some of the projects that we might be able to fund to change the lives of young people.

Adding a living layer to a map... with the help of our visitors

Earlier in the week, we were visited by the three colleagues who have spent a couple of weeks in the school from La Reunion, a visit organised by Mme Oldham, who visited Reunion last year.

The island is in the Indian Ocean, with Mauritius and Madagascar as its nearest neighbours. It is an island with various hazards: from active volcanoes, to tropical cyclones, to sharks off the beaches. It is also an island with various vertical climate zones, and an interesting cultural melting pot of influences. I'm grateful to the Reunionais visitors for their help in adding a new living layer on top of the large map that I had created using the Rasterbator website. Thanks to 8G5 for their help in asking questions.

New Dollar Street website for King's Ely Geographers to investigate...

Gapminder have just launched a new version of their DOLLAR STREET tool, which enables comparisons between countries. At a time when we are moving away from the idea of developed and developing countries, it's useful to have a visual tool of the range of data to show comparisons between places.

The tool has a range of stories, and is based on over 30 000 photos, taken of over 200 families in 40 locations. Families can be ranked within the world as a whole, or smaller areas, and by indicators including toilets and teeth.
It provides an alternative visual way of showing diversity in quality of life.

See Anna Rosling Rönnlund's TED talk too

 

Geocaching - choosing a location

Year 3-6 GeoExplorers were exploring geocaches last week and working out where they might put them, so that they couldn't be seen, but would be accessible on the public areas of the school grounds. To help us, we used the excellent Geocaching website, which provides a full set of guidance.

We also put together a 'Little Book of Hiding' which provide advice on how to hide, with some examples from the classroom and school site. There were ideas on how to hide behind, on top of or behind things, as well as hidden inside things, and also the 'difference' between camouflage and disguise.

We're looking forward to submitting our geocaches for official recognition, so that they are added to the map, and can be found by members of the public.

More to come on this.....

Albatross stomachs and plastic - the images

A Plastic Ocean

Mr. Parkinson went to the offices of the exam board OCR yesterday, and saw a talk which was from Jo Luxton, who is involved in the making of the film: A Plastic Ocean.

This film has taken many years to produce, and involved filming around the world to uncover the truth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other gyres.


Check out the website to find out more about the film.

Jo passed round a few jars, which contained a range of plastic items, all of which had come from the stomachs of baby albatrosses.

Chris Jordan's film 'Message from Midway' came out some time ago, and introduced this idea, along with his Hokusai wave made from plastic pieces, but this was a powerful experience to actually handle the plastic items and see the range of them for real, such as the inkjet cartridge shown in the image here.
Jo asked for our ideas on how to use the movie, and encourage the use of the film to teach certain areas of the curriculum.

This is something which we cover in our unit on the Story of Stuff with Year 8.

New Danny MacAskill video

We use a number of Danny's videos in our teaching and he's just released a new one...
Check it out here... Good for Adventure Landscapes.

Old Harry Drone Footage

Useful to show the coastal features...


Old Harry Rocks_long_edit from Tim Painter on Vimeo.

Levison Wood at the Cambridge Corn Exchange

Coming to Cambridge next year  - useful for King's Ely Geographers who want to have a taste for adventure and exploration...

Google Daydream

Announced yesterday... shall we get some of these?

Interview with Daniel Raven Ellison

Useful particularly for those who came along to the Royal Festival Hall a few weeks ago…

Excellent photo story on Antarctica

On Mashable - the work of Alasdair Turner.

Year 8 should read this...