Connectography - one for Year 12 to watch

Controlled Assessment Booklet for Year 11

I've been building the blog with a range of useful additional materials for students to refer to outside of school when completing coursework…

Scan the QR code or go to the NORFOLK COAST CONTROLLED ASSESSMENT blog for all the support materials.

Student Guide to Controlled Assessment by GeoBlogs on Scribd

Inside a Chinese super cave

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….