UK's UNESCO sites - which are you visiting?

We hope King's students are enjoying their global travels, and not affected by some of the climate related problems across Europe, or other hazards further afield. A lot of French travel is being disrupted by wildfires.

A new updated map has been shared from the UK National Commission for UNESCO.

It can be downloaded as a PDF leaflet with details of each location.

It shows the 65 locations in the UK which have some sort of UNESCO designation.

These include cities of literature, national landscapes and World Heritage Sites, such as the Jurassic Coast and Stonehenge.

How many of these are you visiting this summer?

Pictures welcome....

UK Supermarkets - a new layer from the ESRI Living Atlas

View larger map

UK in 100 Seconds

We showed this video to Year 11 yesterday, and it provoked a great response.

We started with the trailer and the description of the film.
Dan had been to visit us in school last year, so we were pleased that he was in the film.

The UK in 100 Seconds - Behind the scenes from Friends of the Earth on Vimeo.

We then gave out an updated version of the CEH Land Use cover map. The Hodder textbook that we had was a 2007 version of the map as that was the most up to date at the time.

The 2 maps can be compared.

Students were asked to guess what percentage of the UK would be greater than 1% and then feature on the film (we had a copy of the data at the end to give them once the film was shown)

Finally, we shared the link to the ESRI map which accompanies the film, (seen above) and then showed the main event: the film with Ben Zephaniah narration...

The UK in 100 seconds from Friends of the Earth on Vimeo.

UK County Word Cloud project

I've made quite a few word clouds of places over the years... they are a nice way to capture the thoughts of a group of people on a place, or something else... There are plenty of ways of making them, including WordFoto (one of my favourites), Word Art, Wordle (of course) and Tagxedo... (and that's just a few from many...)
Earlier today, I made a word cloud of Cornwall to go along with a writing project which I had started to develop. This was made with WordArt (formerly known as Tagul) and was based on the thoughts of around 40 people on Facebook and Twitter who shared about 250 words describing the county.

It occurred to me that it would be good to construct the UK (each of the counties) and put them all together to make a huge word cloud construction of the UK. At first, I thought I might just work my way around the country, starting with Cornwall and moving onto Devon. I started this process, and have some words in hand for Devon already.
I realised this would take me quite a long time to do (although it would be quite good to think about each county in turn...)
Instead, I worked out a method using a Google Form which would allow for anyone to choose any particular county. The responses to the form are then placed into a spreadsheet, which can then be filtered, and organised appropriately, and this will help to construct the set of word clouds in due course, which will then be added onto a county outline shape.

This is also going to be helpful to provide some guidance for those who might be putting together an entry for this year's Young Geographer of the Year competition by providing ideas for the physical, human and cultural geography of the UK's counties...

I will let this form run for a few months - I won't have time to construct the word clouds until the summer holidays, so will leave it for about 8 weeks and keep reminding you that it's around.
Thanks also to those who have already retweeted and shared the form.
You can enter your ideas into the form below, or go to the form separately here.