Getting perspective

Categories:s1 and s2, Environmental Hazards, Geography General
I have been reading quite a lot about social media and its place in the classroom lately. As students and others may know, I am a huge advocate of its use, particularly when it gives a wider audience to students work. I've already commented on this site before, but it's worth flagging up again, as it shows another positive way in which social media could be brought into the class. Ask 500 allows you to put a question to a potentially worldwide pool of respondents, producing results which can be mapped (just click on the map tab above the question), allowing you to see geographical variations in the responses. We were looking at the idea of whether Brazil was a developed or developing country and couldn't get away from the idea of rich and poor. However, after an initial discussion in class, we still weren't convinced that Brazil was one or the other. I thought it would be useful to see if this was just insular, taking a Scottish perspective, or whether a similar pattern would be observed from a wider geographical spread. What makes this so useful is that I can now take this back to the class and look at the mapped results, and hopefully make it very easy for students to see that the answer really depends on the circumstance of the respondent. The comments left beneath the map are worth a look from the class too. If you haven't tried this tool, why not have a go?