Flying Globes (in more ways than one)

Categories: Geography General, Rural Land Resources, s1 and s2, Games and Quizzes
Had some good moments with my s1 today. We played a game at the beginning of the period, where students would catch a blow up globe and wherever their thumb landed, I would either give them a question, ask for a fact about the place or tell the class something myself. I ripped this idea off an old blow up weather ball that I had. After five minutes of this, I got some excellent work out of the class with very little effort from myself. Although I couldn't say the activity was a 'settler', I think students liked this as a concession to a period that was mostly textbook. Because of the purposeful work, we stopped a few minutes early and had a play with 360Cities , which I blogged about a couple of days ago, flying in through Google Earth. Unfortunately, only the European panoramas seemed to be working, so we'll revisit this. I absolutely love this through Google Earth. Was showing a colleague who's going to Paris a view of the city at night as though we were standing in the Eiffel tower. Amazing stuff, made more powerful when you are flying from place to place into street level.
Tonight, Google Earth Blog had me back on Google Earth, this time through the browser, and really whetting the appetite for the Alps with a paragliding simulation. Watched Andrew Marr do this for real on 'Britain from Above' last night (see the video at the top of the post). He lasted an hour. I lasted about five minutes before trawling into the ground. Pretty good, though!

My lessons tomorrow are more formulaic, I'm afraid, although would like to let Higher see Rome in 360 as some visited recently. It's video time for the Water Balance and Drainage Basins, then some core work. We should know by now about field capacity, soil moisture utilisation, evapotranspiration, deficits and surplus amongst other things. Advanced Higher worked through a practice NAB today for Geographical Issues. Went OK, but I think one more period of sharpening our evaluations before the real thing. Which leaves me s4. We are doing Industry and I'd like to compare Old and New Industrial landscapes. It's either going to be a whiteboard exercise using images or a classtools one. I'm thinking either lights out as a whole class exercise, carefully analysing the landscapes, or if we can get the PC's, a Post-it exercise followed by a dustbin drag and drop for old and new landscapes.