New island in the Ring of Fire

This is something following on from a discussion with Year 9 today about the formation of new land due to volcanic activity... Another StoryMap...

Food Security StoryMap

Thanks to Bob Lang for the tipoff here... Useful for Year 9

Year 8 PEPs

You've got 2 weeks to complete these... Here's some guidance. We'll go through titles tomorrow... Geography based ones very welcome...

PEPS from GeoBlogs

Young Geographer of the Year Competition

Students have had some time to choose their favourite place after short-listing, now it's time to start some research. Here's a presentation to help you...

YGOTY Part 2 from GeoBlogs

Physics-Geography Project

Work is coming in for this project...

The Year 9 Physics and Geography Project - Student Instructions by GeoBlogs on Scribd

Samso: an energy efficient island

Samso is an island off the coast of Denmark. I saw a nice infographic shared on social media last week, which has been sitting in the 'to do something with' pile for a while.

It is setting the pace for the use of renewable technologies apparently, and there were several stories shared about the place this week.
It may be worth exploring further as a possible place context for students to explore.
This article contains more information.

The infographic came from this nicely designed website.
A 10 year plan evaluation.

GI Learner Meeting

Mr. Parkinson spent 4 days in Romania earlier this term meeting with colleagues from the partner schools which the school is involved with for the GI Learner project.

Here's the school on Google Earth.... Quite different to King's, but a very interesting school...

KEJ from the air

Courtesy of the new drone footage in the films 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.

Happy half term...

Have a great half term whatever you have planned.

King's Ely Aerial....

What urban patterns and processes can you see in this video?

Meeting Tayna

Mr Parkinson met Tayna, who stars in the Fairtrade Fortnight materials which we use, at the GA conference over the Easter break. Here's one of Tayna's videos..
My Next Fairtrade Adventure (for 7-11 yrs) Part 2 from Fairtrade Schools on Vimeo.
This is the second part of My Next Fairtrade Adventure for 7 to 11 year olds.

Tayna, a student from North London, travels to Kenya to find out how climate change is affecting tea farmers and how Fairtrade can tackle some of the effects.

Here they are in a selfie taken by Tayna...

ArcGIS Online now free for all schools

We have been using ArcGIS Online in school for several years now, and ESRI UK have kindly given us a free subscription for the last few years so that we can share our work.

At the end of the Awards presentation at this week's GA Conference Stuart Bonthrone, the MD of Esri UK stood up and made an announcement which was in some ways inevitable after events previously in the USA, and also very welcome.

Stuart announced that from immediate effect, ArcGIS Online will be free to all UK schools.

Under the heading of "The Science of Where", Stuart then played a short video featuring the inspirational work of Thierry Torres and colleagues at Dover Grammar School.


If you want to know more, and sign up your school, head for the ESRI UK Schools page.



I also had the chance to meet Steve Richardson, who is being employed to produce new resources and materials for teachers to encourage more use of the tool in classes.
There are already over 60 resources available, with plenty more to come.



Finally, check out the GeoMentors programme, which pairs up schools with GIS professionals.

Sign up your school now

Wild Writing

A Padlet produced by Helen Caldwell as part of the DLAB Erasmus project. Ideas for Wild Writing.
On Tuesday, Mr. Parkinson will be leading a CPD session for all Y1-6 staff on ideas for Outdoor Learning.

Plasticide

Year 8, I hope that you saw this story in the news over the Easter break: Greenpeace placing a statue, which had been on display outside the National Theatre, outside the offices of Coca Cola, a company which produces billions of plastic bottles each year from plastic which has mostly never been recycled, and is then used just once.