Survey the world from your classroom

Categories: Geography General, Other

I've been looking at Ask 500 People over the last two nights and really like the idea of using this in a number of ways. For instance, one of my Advanced Higher students is doing an Issues essay about how the credit crunch will impact on climate change strategies in the UK. I saw this vote and its interesting to note both the result and the negative view of the Europeans who completed the survey question. I also thought that this might be an interesting starter when doing Migration with Higher. Like any site such as this, there are some silly questions (e.g How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? 203 responses!) and admittedly some funny ones too, but the serious questions seem to get a good response, and lots of discussions seem to have been triggered, for example, by the US election and the impact Obama may or may not have. Mostly, I like the thought that I could post a question here, which would later be repeated to a class and their response could be compared to a global sample. I submitted a question tonight as we are soon going to be looking at forced migration. It chills me to see the similarities between DR Congo and Rwanda, which we study. I wanted to see if these similarities were seen pretty universally, but also if people bothered. The voting patterns for most questions show a large number of votes from USA and Western Europe, and I remember a quote from the film Hotel Rwanda about people here saying how terrible the situation was and then going back to eating their dinner. I'll watch the results with interest.

More about how classes/year groups can express an opinion now... I've been looking at Power League as a class voting system. There are so many uses for this to let classes prioritise issues in a debate, but my immediate thoughts were how I could use it to involve s1 PSE classes in prioristising link themes with our Malawi school. I have Poetry of Place from English and some work from Geography to send, but I'd like more democracy in what we do with the link. Will be discussing this tomorrow with Mr Creighton.