Dumb, dumber and disappearing

Categories: Geography General
This week is Geography Awareness Week. I am ashamed to say that a colleague had to make me aware of that fact! It does give the opportunity in the last week of term to try to raise students awareness of place, and Tony Cassidy has put together a nice activity which I am hoping to use as a starter with s3 tomorrow. I wonder if the class would like to make their own contributions for others to try?

Where am I?

View more OpenOffice presentations from TonyCassidy.

We were talking about the action of glaciers the other day with this class and when I tried to explain plucking, I referred to ' Dumb and Dumber' and the ski lift scene, which just happens to be on as I type :) On a more serious note, it would seem that the glaciers we visited in the Alps are disappearing at such a fast rate that they are causing national borders to be redrawn, thanks to Tris from sln for the video below:

Let me google that for you....

Categories: Advanced Higher

One of the first things that I have done with my Advanced Higher class in the last couple of years is introduce the class to the kind of student uses of the internet which Ollie Bray has blogged about and presented on so often. This usually involves first of all setting up a social bookmarking account. I have used del.icio.us with the last two classes, but am thinking of trialling diigo with this group, as you will be able to annotate your bookmarks, which might be handy when you are filtering useful sites or parts of sites for your Issues essays. This will allow you to access your bookmarks from any computer with internet access, share links with each other, with me and likewise, me with you. So, if you are searching for sites to bookmark, will you just google?

Again, there are ways to make things easier here - This site is from google itself and has some useful tips for searching which might help you avoid the squillions of search results which can be thrown up with a vague search term. It's also worth having a look at google alerts, the more specific the better and I'll also show you how to create an rss feed of news on the bbc website. We'll then set up a bloglines account where we can store feeds from here and other sites. I have toyed with the idea of either blogging a field notebook, maybe through posterous, or doing this through edmodo, which I've been impressed with while using with s2. The beauty of blogging is that other people could comment on your work, whereas edmodo allows a little more privacy and allows you to bounce things off each other as a group too. A lot of your work could be submitted through this too. Finally, still thinking that twitter would have its uses for fieldwork monitoring, but we'll see how time goes here.