sharegeography.co.uk

A useful list of ideas here for beginning and experienced teachers. Hat-tip Patricia.

Has excited many people of late, thanks Noel Jenkins. Here is a Wordle of our aims, vision and values.

VideoJug: Ask The Kids: How To Survive Secondary School

Another great little video, I like the idea of producing a similar video for College.

Inspired by Noel Jenkins, I’ve been having a play with Google Maps for a couple of projects I want to work on over the coming year. The maps are now embeddable, you can add images and videos as well. Here is an example of a Berlin walk from the MFL-Humanities visit, including a video from student blogger Stringy, it took me around twenty minutes. Direct link.

View Larger Map

I’ve been having a play with Animoto this evening, it allows you to produce impressive looking videos of your images. You only upload images and if you wish music, the website does all the hard work mixing the final product. I uploaded from my flickr account and used the music available. Short movies are free. This video shows images from our Japanese Exchange.

Hat-tip Justin Medved

Tom Biebrach has adapted my weather and climate task using webcams, he has produced a Google map with links to different webcams. The task is accompanied by a worksheet. Nice work.

Penguins in Formation

Originally uploaded by Mulsanne

Read an interesting post by Dave Stacey on classroom displays, which led me to this Flickr group showing images of classroom displays, some great practice on show. This also lead me to the classroom display blog by Linda Hartley.

Another advantage of Slideshare is networking with other educators.

I’ve started a Slideshare group for Geographer educators to share PowerPoints. You need to sign up as a member of Slideshare to donate or download contributions. Once a member, you can share your presentations with the group, when viewing your presentation, look to right, there are a list of options, choose send to group, when you click on this, a dialogue box will appear, choose Geography presentation and send.

The group will email you updates of new presentations added. This might be a good way of sharing teaching resources with our partnership schools?

I’ve enjoyed playing with Picture Dots today, basically an online website that allows you to produce your own dot to dot puzzles. It’s easy to use and when finished you can download a PDF of your creation. Here’s an example of one I created. Which country is this?

How could be use this? It could make a fun little starter, I’ve copied my image and pasted it into PowerPoint, a kind of mystery starter for a country study, a student could come up to the IWB and solve it, alternatively they might like a fun little exercise for revising diagrams. How about getting students to create them?

Rob has just finished a brilliant mini-unit on Israel for us, his first task for students is a jigsaw puzzle of the main geographical features of the country. He has used a piece of freeware called Formulator Tarsia, from the Hermitech Laboratory, originally designed to create maths problems, but it has a number of cross-curricular applications.

Once downloaded and installed, it is relatively simple to use, it took me about twenty minutes to get the hang of it, you can choose from three types of puzzle, jigsaw, dominoes and card.

When you have chosen your puzzle type, you can type in the contents for your puzzle, this is in the input screen, when you have completed one field, click on the next number in the sidebar and a new input field will appear.

You can check your puzzle contents by clicking the table tab at the bottom of the screen.

Clicking on the output tab will reveal the puzzle that students will be given, of course, you could cut these up before the lesson, but the puzzle will already be unsorted.

Clicking on the solution tab will reveal the solution to your puzzle; particularly useful if you don’t want to solve it yourself, or want to provide students who are struggling with the finished answer.

You can print off the pages, with the exception of the input page, I haven’t got a printer so I use Primo PDF to print to a PDF file , this means I can print it later, as well as saving an electronic copy in this format.

You can save your puzzle by pressing the disc icon, but you will not be able to open these on a College computer, this file will only be recognised by the Tarsia programme, hence the need to print a copy.

This is an example of a parquet jigsaw of 12 pieces that I produced on European capitals, of course this is the solution!

What I really like about the programme is that you can insert images, here is an example of an 8 piece dominoes activity solution, that I produced using Ordnance Survey map symbols.

To insert images, in the input screen, click on the image icon at the top of the screen. The image is automatically resized for the puzzle, so you need to think carefully about the quality of the image you use.

I think this has legs, it could be used to produce simple a starter or plenary exercise, alternatively a more complex puzzle could be produced as a mini-topic review.

Let me know what you think…