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.