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Census dropped through the door and completed it online…

A good Geography FM meet this week, discussed a range of issues including achievement, revision and mobile policies. A replay can be found here. Do join us for the next one. Great website from Noel Jenkins- listening to Los Angeles -considering how to get this into a lesson.

Spent part of the weekend preparing some resources about the development of the Olympic site in Newham for CCEA GCSE spec, I’m now less a fan of the 2012 games. Nearly finished the course though…

Of course, the major breaking stories was about the Japanese tsunami. Spent much of Friday watching the live feeds and answering questions. I think the images said enough. Some interesting screenshots from the QuakeZone IPhone app.

Huge cluster of tectonic activity on the day.

Magnitude of the foreshocks and aftershocks were quite intimidating.

Lots of geographical thinking going on from various geography colleagues about how to respond to such an event. great collation of a range of ideas from Alan Parkinson. I think it’s a little too early to get to grips with the huge implications of the disaster, but will be showing the BBC Japanese news special as an overview. Considering an emotional response to the event using a 100 word challenge, simple but effective technique.

We have links with Toyota schools in Japan, I hope all our connections are safe and well at this challenging time.

Loved this find by Terry on the SLN forum. Great little starter which I’m going to use as an introduction to a revision of fronts.

Also posted a response to a mobile policy review that is being conducted at my place of work on my personal pages, any response would be grateful.

Sorted our 19th Geography Flash Meet on the 10th of March, all are welcome to join us.

One area I had success with last week was looking at the Christchurch earthquake. I like the idea of floating topicality, it makes students realise that geography is a living subject. I do struggle though  with developing an appropriate response to such a recent tragic event. For Key Stage 4 it was a useful revision of plate tectonics, for Key Stage 3 I used a little strategy I picked up from Ian Murray. I first shows a clip in of the quake aftermath from the BBC, then explained the tectonic theory. I then read eyewitness accounts from the BBC website, as students actively drew what came into their minds.

It was interesting to see how students responded in a variety of ways, from artistic representations…

To storyboard accounts…

To images with associated quotes…

It was interesting then to discuss why they had drawn such responses and what key themes ran through the class set of images.

Also signed up for the RSS feed of a new Alan Parkinson blog about supporting geography teachers. Should be good… no pressure

Case study summary sheet about the L’Aquila earthquake, 2009. (250kb pdf). Also testing whether Itunes allows the download of pdf documents.

Different people have various kinaesthetic ways of making tectonic plate boundaries ‘sticky’. I used this idea when teaching tectonics last year, students changed the position of their hands to represent the different plate boundaries.

There is a practice, then the names of the boundaries appear and students have to show the correct hand positions, its timed, to make it a little more challenging. Add some music and it’s an enjoyable plenary.

Remember to show the power!

Now that I have overcome the trauma of returning, I thought I would begin to share some resources I’ve been using in my classroom.

I’ve now authoring in Office 2007, so those with a lower spec will need to convert files before use, if you have 2003, it should automatically ask you if you want to install the necessary plug-in- I have to for use in school. There might we some text shift on conversion- this has somewhat wound me up over the first week or so.

Year 11 are in the last year of the Pilot, the final year of the syllabus, we have been producing presentations about the Asian Tsunami. The last year before this the Pilot blog bites the dust…

Year 10 are following the CCEA syllabus, I’m really enjoying this at the moment, a much greater chance of being a sage, despite this not been educationally trendy, I like it- I quite like trying to enthral.

We’re currently looking at coasts. The first lesson we discussed land-use and conflict along the coast, we also used the Bournemouth extract from the specimen specification materials. I produced a little seaside Animoto to encourage some discussion, but it would infringe copyright to share, we also looked at the coastal fly past from the first series of Coasts, from this we drew out different land-uses and different landform features. We then went on to look at waves, constructive and destructive, and completed a classification exercise. Thanks to Liz Smith for the Big Wave video idea. I’ve also been making use of Dan Raven Ellison’s Learning Through Windows videos, which are hosted at the Little Heath School Geography web pages. Sadly there aren’t more of these to cover a range of topics. We finished off, with a Content Generator just a minute game.

Next lesson we discussed the difference between weathering and erosion, how the the nature of the deposits differed, and then went onto look at the main erosion processes taking place along the coastline. We finished our week with a little coastal aerobics, some people like Kung-fu, I like the non-violent alternative.

I’ve now produce a new page of Radical Geography for my new CCEA resources.

Nothing much new, caught up in coursework and finishing the R.S. and Geography syllabuses.

I’ve started to put revision materials on Pilot Geography related to the pre-release booklet.

The first presentation is comparing Hutton Henry and Harbone, with our place, Ilkeston.

Also noticed a broken link to the 2008 resources, which people might find useful.

Not much new with KS3, I’ve added a homework task for illustrating the Richter Scale, I like to enlarge them to A3, makes nice display work. I’ve also added a simple starter/review for hurricanes- it has a couple of weather and climate questions included for revision purposes.

A late one due to problems with the web host. The stop disasters hurricane task when down well, so I’ve adapted it for earthquakes.

Also added a couple of new bits for hurricanes, the first is a simple match-up exercise with strategies for reducing the impact of hurricanes. I’ve also added two homework tasks, one is about developing hurricane preparedness within the population and the second about the Saffir-Simpson scale.

I’ve now updated various bits on Radical Geography, due to requests for certain resources. I expect the tectonic page to develop over the coming weeks, as I get all shook up with Year 8.

Nice flash map showing the latest earthquakes around the world. With thanks Katherine.