Who wants to be a Flickr Millionaire?

I joined the photo community / sharing site Flickr back in 2004, and have been a PRO member for some time, since they reduced the size of the free space, and focussed on supporting members particularly. 

Flickr is where I share my images rather than having tens of thousands on my phone.

Image: Southwold from the pier, shared under CC license

My account page is here.

Yesterday, I passed one million views of my images....

At the time of posting, I have 45, 600 images shared on the site, many of them organised into albums and searchable by title or by the date of upload. I need to spend significant time checking on naming as this will help the images be found by those searching Flickr.

All of my images are shared with Creative Commons licenses for non-commercial use with attribution.

I'm pleased that over the years several of my images have been used in books, including ones that I was not involved with, including a recent book on Sandy Irvine and George Mallory.

Feel free to go and take a look and you will find something useful for your teaching.

New iGCSe textbook - author copies arrived

Good to see this arrive, and put it on the shelves of the GeoLibrary. 

Well, it was over a year ago that we started work on the 4th edition of the Collins textbook to support the teaching of the updated Cambridge iGCSE Geography specification (0460). I worked with an excellent authoring team - who stepped up early on when it was reduced from the original size.

Over the weekend, author copies of the book finally arrived. It's always good to have the physical object in your hands. 

The cover is a little 'minimalist' for my liking but is the style used for a range of books for other subjects published by Collins.

There were a lot of people involved in the production of the book including the author team who stepped up when we lost two authors early in the process. There have been many hundreds of hours of working on edits and updates and several drafts and proofs. 

The textbook will be accompanied by a Teacher Guide and a Workbook.

These are due to be published in April I believe. They are printed in the UK on responsibly sourced paper using vegetable-based inks.

It covers the new iGCSE Specification (and related qualifications) and has been approved by Cambridge University Press and Assessment as meeting the requirements of the Cambridge Pathway. This is important as it ensures that the book fully covers the specification and assessment requirements.

Feel free to order an inspection copy or one to have on your shelves even if you aren't teaching this qualification / specification. And if you ARE teaching it, then you obviously need to purchase large quantities of the books. The Workbooks look particularly nice and very useful to support learners.

The book is published by Collins (in 2025 of course)

Paperback, 368pp

ISBN: 978-0-00-872576-1

Price: £28.99

iGCSE Geography - 4th edition textbook now available to order

A project that I've been involved in for over a year will finally see the light of day soon and the first of the three books has just become available and ready for ordering from the Collins website.

It's the 4th edition of a textbook for the newly updated iGCSE Geography specification. 

I was involved with the first edition while working for the Geographical Association.

Along with this student book - the 4th edition, written for the new Cambridge iGCSE Geography specification, there is also a Teacher's Guide, which contains lesson plans and extra resources, plus answers for all the questions in the book.

There is also a Workbook which has been written by Becky Kitchen. This contains extra work on iGCSE Skills along with exam style questions and other activities.

These other two books will be out in April.

I'm proud to have worked as a Series Editor on the three books in the series.

Special thanks to my fellow authors John Rutter, Rob Bircher, Becky Kitchen and my colleague Claire Kyndt.

Thanks also to Cathy, Roisin, Letitia and particularly Lucy from Collins, and others involved in copy editing and design. It's been a team effort.

Thanks also to Cambridge for their prompt and helpful feedback.

I'm looking forward to seeing the first hard copies.

If you're at the GA Conference in April, go and see the Collins stand in the exhibition space and take a look - I shall be there on the Wednesday afternoon.

Far from a plane old tree....

More than £100 000 has been awarded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund to help safeguard the future of one of the UK's oldest and most important heritage trees - The Great London Plane of Ely! 

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license

I am lucky to be able to walk through the Old Palace gardens whenever I want, and standing in the garden is a huge London plane tree.

Via the King's Ely social media feed.

Believed to be the first ever National Lottery grant allocated to an individual historic tree, the £121 000 will allow innovative bracing and pruning work to be carried out on the tree by Italian and UK experts, using ground-breaking techniques for the first time in this country.
The Great London Plane of Ely is situated in the gardens of the Old Palace, which is home to our Sixth Form Centre. 

The tree was planted in around 1674, and is believed to have been a gift from King Charles II to the Bishop of Ely.

David Day, Chair of Governors at King's, is leading the campaign to support the tree. 

He said: 

“We are thrilled that The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded a grant to fund the conservation of this heritage tree of national importance. The money will help to ensure that this magnificent tree can be enjoyed by future - as well as current - generations. It stands as a fine example of how our natural heritage can be conserved and nurtured. The funding allows innovative techniques to be implemented for the first time in the UK, providing a blueprint for the conservation of many other important trees. This grant would not be possible without the National Lottery players, and we thank them for their generous support.”

The Great London Plane of Ely was recognised as one of the Top 50 Great British Trees by The Tree Council in 2002 – the only plane tree on the list. It is commemorated with a plaque on site.

The Tree Council CEO, Sara Lom, said: 

“As identified in 2002, the selected heritage trees were of exceptional beauty, rarity or national interest, some as old as medieval cathedrals and a few older than Stonehenge. All our great British Heritage Trees are equally worthy of protection as are our stately homes and castles.”

With funding now in hand, a team of UK and Italian arboricultural experts guided by Dr Stefania Gasperini, former President of the European Arboricultural Council, will employ an approach called morphophysiology to conserve the tree. This technique takes account of how the tree has developed throughout its life, managing it as naturally as possible to support its future long-term growth. While employed extensively in Europe, this project will be the first time this approach has been used to conserve a heritage tree in the UK.

While the Great London Plane of Ely continues to enjoy vigorous good health and displays plenty of new season extension growth, old cable bracing installed in the 1940s and 1980s now needs to be replaced. The new bracing will be installed within the tree canopy, and over a 4-year period, precision pruning will encourage growth in the areas where the tree needs additional strength, sustaining its vitality long into the future.

The team behind the Ely conservation efforts, including Will Temple, Grounds and Gardens Manager at King's, are working with The Tree Council, The Woodland Trust, Arboricultural Association, and the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering.

The conservation work is set to start in July, and real-time data monitoring will be gathered in order to assess the new bracing and pruning regime across the seasons, with the information collected made available to help inform conservation efforts for other heritage trees.

The Great London Plane of Ely (Platanus x hispanica) is a hybrid of the Oriental plane and American sycamore, and is believed to be one of the UK’s original London Planes. It is also the largest London Plane in the UK at around 42m high.

Plans are in place to ensure community engagement and public access to the tree through organised garden open days, artist events, tours, and participation in Heritage Open Days.

A camera will also be installed to allow the public to access live footage of the tree at any time, through The Tree Council website.

Maternity cover vacancy available at King's Ely

 A job opportunity for you to work at my school.

A part-time maternity cover teaching Geography in King’s Ely Senior school is currently available from September. 

This would involve 

Deadline to apply is 19th of March.

Details are here. Happy to answer any questions.

The post is part time to cover maternity leave for the whole of the 2025/26 academic year. 

This is a 50-60 % timetable and would ideally be over 2.5 - 3 days a week.

The postholder’s duties will involve, but will not necessarily be limited to: 

• Preparing and teaching high quality lessons to stimulate and encourage pupils in year 9 and at GCSE and potentially A Level
• Set and mark homework in line with school and department policies
• Record and review student progress; providing targets and guidance to improve student performance
• Offer support sessions for pupils
• Establish and maintain professional relationships with staff, pupils and parents
• Supporting department trips and events
• Attending parent’s evenings and other whole school events
• Setting and marking internal assessments
• Supporting the A level NEA programme by supervising candidates in their investigations

Introduction to Globalisation from BBC Bitesize

Looking for a short Globalisation introduction and found this page. It's on the Welsh Bitesize page, so has a Welsh bias of course, but it's very good.

The video is useful too....

Should we be eating insects?

Year 7 have got to this point in the year again...

Windrush Child Updates

It's worth looking at the BBC's Bitesize for some extra detail on the book. There's a nice illustrated plot summary of the story (contains spoilers if you haven't read it...)

Details here of Windrush.

Rubber Duck Boom!

Here’s a song that I made using SUNO: a tool which Matt Podbury introduced me to at Practical Pedagogies which uses AI to write a song in whatever style you want, and on a theme. 

This was to go alongside one of my favourite lessons, when we explore the story of the Ever Laurel and the 29000 bath toys fell into the North Pacific in 1992 and revealed some of the workings of ocean gyres and their role in concentrating ocean plastics, to which the bath toys added as they disintegrated over the decades since.

Of course the frogs, turtles and beavers are always left out of the narrative... 

Enjoy the Electronic beats of ‘Rubber Duck Boom’. Sing along to the chorus!

Will Fry on The Fens

Will Fry's Changing Places Substack had a recent post on The Fens: the location for King's Ely. It explored the way that places are represented in order to justify colonising or changing them.

e.g.

William Camden’s Britannia (the Lonely Planet guide of its day), written in 1586, depicted the Fen-dwellers as “a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell: rude, uncivil and envious to all others”. This is an early example of the idea that the nature and character of a place can shape the people in it.

It refers to James Boyce's excellent book 'Imperial Mud' which looks at the landscape of the Fens.

Windrush Monument

I passed through Waterloo a few weeks ago to head for the GTE Conference.

Waterloo is home to the National Windrush Monument. 

This was unveiled in June 2022 by Prince William so is a relatively new addition to the station.

We read 'Windrush Child' by Benjamin Zephaniah with Year 7 students and have done for the last 4 years.

Taste of Tomorrow

A very useful series of articles in the BBC Future series. 

Plenty to inform our Year 7 unit 'Food for Thought'.

Toporopa

A site with map quizzes. Suitable for KS1 and 2 pupils.

The focus is on learning the geography of Europe.

National Character Areas (NCAs)

Natural England has updated the National Landscape Character assessments on their website.

 Wherever you are in England you are in one of these areas, which has a particular character.

Each NCA represents an area of distinct and recognisable character at the national scale. 

Their boundaries follow natural lines in the landscape, not county or district boundaries. 

This makes them a good framework for decision-making and planning for future change. 

The information contained within the NCA profiles aims to help guide land management and other activities to strengthen character and resilience, responding to pressures such as climate change.

I was born in Area 38: Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire Coalfield

I studied in Area 37: Yorkshire Southern Pennine Fringe

I trained as a teacher in Area 41: Humber Estuary

My first job was in Area 69: Trent Valley Washlands

The first home I owned was in Area 76: North West Norfolk and my school was on the very edge of Area 46: The Fens

I spent three years working in Area 37 - Yorkshire Southern Pennine Fringe, when I worked for the Geographical Association.

I now live in Area 84: Mid Norfolk, and my current school is in Area 46: The Fens

What numbers have you lived in?