Disaster Movie

Categories: Environmental hazards
This is for the s4 lesson today. You have been looking at Earthquakes, their causes and impacts with Miss Anwar and Mrs Gordon. Mrs Gordon and I were discussing how to approach your case study for this part of the course and thought it would be good if you learned a little more about Haiti as it's current. For any earthquake case study, you are expected to know certain key things, which I've listed below and should from the basis of your internet research. Try to refine your searchesas there are so many items about Haiti just now, it might be difficult finding what you are after exactly:

1. The cause of the earthquake -this needs to be fairly spcific. Was it at a plate boundary or a fault line? If a plate boundary, which plates, which type of boundary (e.g. destructive) and what exactly happened? Give details about the size of the earthquake, the focus and the epicentre if possible here.
2. How accurate were predictions/preparations? - earthquakes are really difficult to predict, but what had scientists been saying aboutthe likelihood of a big quake in the area. What preventative measures had been taken? Was the area well prepared or not?
3. The impact of the quake on the landscape - This referes to both the physical landscape e.g. sometimes earthquakes will trigger a landslide, for instance, and the human landscape- buildings, communications etc. Lots of examples needed and plenty available here
4. The impact on the people- How many people died,were injured, made homeless? Did the earthquake cause contaminated water supplies and disease? How was industry affected? What about jobs?
For both 3 and 4 you need to think short and long term impacts.
5. What was the relief effort and how effective was it? - Think of short and long term aid, what it was and where it came from, talk figures- how much in donations, grants, what happened in Haiti's case to the national debt? Think of organisations such as Oxfam and the Red Cross-did they have a role, and if so what?
Mrs Gordon asks that you work on this today and next Friday to create your own movies in movie maker, with a class showing and feedback at a later time. I've put a simpler example of a disaster movie from a few years back which an s2 created. Tryb to find music that fits, footage if possible and there will be plenty of images available too, but try and credit your sources.

To aid a failing memory...

Categories: s1 and s2, Population, Advanced Higher
Very quick post, pretty standard stuff tomorrow, but putting it here so I can access easily in school. New rotation again in s1, wondering about doing a class rules wordle based on what the students want, can stick in the front of their jotters. Usual moving activity as a starter, but this time I'm going to ask the students to write the number of questions they could answer themselves before they circulate the class filling their sheet. I hope to emphasise the importance of collaboration, as it's something we'll do a lot over the rotation. I sometimes think I don't make the reason for doing this activity clear enough. I have a pretty old fashioned demographic transition model lesson up my sleeve. I find this is just one of the topics where talking as we build the diagram is the most effective way to communicate what it means. I normally follow this up with a living graph exercise from 'Thinking through Geography' by David Leat, and will probably shoehorn this in as a lesson starter before I do any of this, as it's worked well before. That said, Miss Anwar, who is with us for a few weeks, might have something better to offer :) Finally, I planned to mark Geographical Study drafts over the weekend, but have made nowhere near the progress I hoped to due to prelims and a few other things I have been working on. I'll hopefully get a bit of red ink on everyone's before the second period of the double tomorrow while you finish the London sound mapping exercise in the first for your assessment folder.

A sustainable Dubai

Here are some of the designs that second year have submitted for the sustainable buildings exercise. Which one is your favourite and why? Great work by the class

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Loch Lubnaig

Should have been working today, but chances to get the whole family out are few and far between. We drove up to Stirling, through to Lochearnhead and down to Callander before returning home via the Glengoyne route. Loch Lubnaig was the highlight, a hole in the clouds allowing an explore. The Loch looks like glass-thats because it was still frozen
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See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mr O'D's class posterous

The old and the new (renewed again)

Confusion of land uses from Sumerlee
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Posted via email from Mr O'D's class posterous

Game of two halves...

Categories: s1 and s2, Population, Environmental Hazards, Other
Funny day tomorrow, out for the afternoon, which means I'll need to exit stage left half way through my s1 ICT class, while at the same time covering the morning for Miss Armstrong who is out at a subject group meeting. This means I'll have the s2 class. We have been working on Hot Deserts, and I think myself and Miss E both think it's almost time to move on. Last year, I finished off this part of the topic with a competition, so we're going to run the same again, with prizes (probably HMV vouchers). We partly used the GA Dubai resources, the work of Noel Jenkins, and tried looking at Dubai as a desert anomaly- a hugely populous place in the desert- and what lay in store for it in the future. In particular, we look at tourism and designing a sustainable hotel. I posted about this last year, and the designs that resulted from it were very impressive. This also links into a Google Earth activity where the students have to site the hotel. Miss Armstrongs other class requires a wee bit less in resourcing as they are looking at plate tectonics and have a mapping from memory activity to undertake.
For my own classes, I'll miss s3, who had some good inputs today to discussions around yesterday's video. I have left a little textbook work, but hopefully, technology being well behaved, most of the class should be able to use the 6 million human beings site along with this worksheet as a little extension activity of some of the themes you have been looking at over the last three periods.
For s1, I feel very bad as this class seems to have been disrupted the most by my absences, through illness or other commitments. We had an excellent period today, where many of the class submitted questions to a group of pupils hundreds of miles away at the very start of the period, talked about our own Haiti work, did the Hurricane Experiment, introduced a collaborative mapping activity and ended the lesson singing! Depending on whether it's a geography teacher taking the lesson tomorrow, it's either pop-up hurricanes or moving on to Tony's emotion graph, something I'd rather have held back on, as it doesn't quite fit with where we are, but is probably easiest for another teacher to handle in terms of content.
That's the geography covered. ICT sounded like an interesting lesson on Friday. The class were asked to design a mobile phone of the future. I don't know how much direction they were given in terms of this, but I had a chat with Ian Stuart tonight, who made a few suggestions which I can bring into the lesson tomorrow, including starting by rating their own phone. This links in quite well, I suppose, with some of the work the class did about computer hardware and add ons.

Re-cover and a little more

Categories: s1 and s2, Population, Advanced Higher
First day back tomorrow, God willing, and have to hit the ground running really. Advanced Higher is an easy lesson to prepare - it will be pretty much prelim practice as you sit the paper immediately after this coming long weekend. Also, due to being off, I'll be working hard to get your Study drafts back to you. I've already started looking over some in class, so please be ready for quite a savaging of the written attempts-as I've said already, it doesn't mean that the ideas or the effort isn't good, often it's just better ways to organise the words, present the data or draw out more from your own hard graft in analysis and evaluation.
I'm using an old favourite for s3, the video above. I normally play this twice to three times. First time is used to answer the 2 questions for each image, second time involves class members running around with post its to the map, and third time is a plenary to bring it all together. I think I'll add a bit to this by asking the class to research three of the places in the video to explain the associated population pattern.
Finally, with s1, I'd like to move right on to Hurricanes, with both the Hurricane experiment, Hurricane Mapping and the Hurricane Song, but we also might be able to work with another school. Mr Rogers of The Priory School, near Portsmouth, is doing some work with his classes on Haiti, and I was showing him some of the work of the class. He particularly liked the facebook page idea, and we briefly talked about the classes linking tomorrow through twitter or facebook, so our plans may change...

Edible lessons

Jelly Baby Population Game

View more presentations from GeoBlogs.

Categories: s1 and s2, Population, Other
Time for jelly babies tomorrow, providing I'm out of my pit in time to get them on the journey in. I love this game, and the students seem to really enjoy it, although some well handled sweets, despite my best efforts, seem to disappear from the table. I think I did this before exploring in more detail through this site previously.
With s1, a brief edmodo demo so that the Haiti work can be collected, then a little exercise I tried before as a starter to wild weather where the students set their own homework (although they don't realise it at the time) by submitting their own questions about the topic, which are then redistributed.
My s1 ICT class are doing e-mail at the moment and then the internet. I wondered if there would be anything that we could use from The Virtual Revolution, available at the moment on iplayer? Will require a wee bit of editing if I do though...
Thanks to Alan for the presentation.

Help this class help Haiti?

Categories: Other
Today started off with a little doubt about the direction we were taking with our Haiti work, but I was a lot happier with things by the end of the period. With support from the DHT, the class had decided on a number of ways to raise awareness about the earthquake and the relief effort. The class have created a facebook page to spread information and promote school charities. A condition I have asked is that they include prominently a page/link to internet safety resources, and we will resolve this by the end of the week. I also liked the links to other ways of giving and the mission statement. I think it might also be a good idea to involve some s6 mentors here in support of the group and the page.

Others in the class are creating posters for strategic placement around the school to keep the disaster appeal prominent in people's mind using bighugelabs and the motivator. A small group is working on a petition based around donations from governments by comparison and we had talked about creating an online version of this to reach a wider audience, ans some pairs are working on possible presentation slides which will hopefully be presented via assembly to some year groups
My fear was that, although all of these ideas had come from the students, I thought I may have started something that we couldn't finish, but I think the students deserve great credit so far for the way they have gon about the task. Friday is d-day, and the point where everything needs to be complete for submission to the DHT. I am sure they would appreciate any advice or encouragement that readers are willing to offer :)