Aidan journeys to the centre of the earth

aidan.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Creative revision of the 2008 Brendan Foster film to make the fantasy more factual, if that makes sense. Well done, Aidan. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

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

Easter School: Higher reminder

We are going to try to cover the following topics; River Basin Management, Urban Change and its Management, Population, Industry, Atmosphere and Rural Geography. I'm going to use the first half of the 3 hours to look at the first two topics, as they are paper two extended answer questions and often suffer from a lack of detail in responses. The most marks in the paper are usually given for the question on the chosen river where students discuss social, economic and environmental benefits and adverse consequences of the management of the river. I think I may split the class up by distributing parts of the answer and asking the students to 'find' their group, where they can then present on. for example, the social benefits and so on. I will 'mark' their input and the students will collate any named examples mentioned as each group presents. I'm then going to ask students to pair up and we will look at two of the questions in UCM which require case study knowledge, the first about the impact of site and situation (Glasgow) and the second, an area of redevelopment (Glasgow Harbour). For both, I'm going to borrow a Tony Cassidy idea, 5 word case studies. For the first, I'm going to ask each pair to list 5 key ideas they would wish to include in their answer on Glasgow's site and situation as well as 5 locations which would provide evidence of this e.g. key idea - Religion, location - Cathedral, on raised land above the flood plain. For the second, I'm splitting this in two. First of all, 5 reasons why redevelopment needed (with location evidence) and second, a description of the changes (again, with location evidence). As students share their ideas afterwards, I will collate these on the board and then give students a chance to answer one of the questions in detail to time - so important at this time of year - and with the marking scheme provided afterwards.
In the second half of the day, I am starting with walkabout talkabout for atmosphere, as it's a topic which most students have indicated some difficulty with, followed by questions on cells and ocean currents. In the latter part of the day, I'm borrowing that paired appointments again to cover Rural, Industry and Population with a whole class review of each after completion. And then, I'm sure, both the kids and myself will be done. Everything that we produce which could be used by candidates in their revision will be posted to the Marr Geography twitter account.

Easter school: Stanard Grade reminder

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Getting ready for Easter school tomorrow and using this as a reminder to myself of the sequnce that I want to do things in with the two groups. This first post is for Standard Grade and I think I'm going to use an idea handed to me by Pamela Manley on twitter. It involves asking students in advance of activities to make 'appointments' with others in the class and as I have each group for 3 hours, I thought it might be useful if there were six different pairings, to be rotated at half hour intervals over six different sections of work. The first is a look at question 1, which relies very much on interpreting the ordnance survey map.
I've embedded a Google Earth view of the Dolgellau/Barmouth area which we will be focusing on tomorrow, and in class, I want to use GE in conjunction with the Ordnance Survey overlay. I'm planning on leaving the area on the board for students to explore if they wish while they collaborate and then employing the overlay when we are going over the first activity. Before I give out the past question, I am going to ask students to use acetates over the OS map to identify glacial landscape features, settlement functions, land uses and conflicts in the first pair. For the final part of this question, we will split again to look at a techniques question and, instead of asking the pair to answer the question, I will present choices of techniques which students have to select as appropriate for the scenario and justify why these have been chosen. We will stay in these pairings to look at gathering and processing techniques in an urban question. Finally, each student will then attempt an urban 'explain' question on their own before we mark this as a class.
For the next part of the session, we will swap partners again and seven population questions will be split amongst the class and the class will 'teach' to the question using flipcharts, with the opportunity for students to feed back on each and then being presented with the solution. Lastly, we will swap partners a further 3 times to cover development indicators, trade and trading alliances. Two of the three questions will involve pair collaboration to answer and then mark, while (hopefully) the last will involve use of a randomly picked revision technique to see how you could use it to prepare for the given question. I'm pretty sure this will cover the time, but if it doesn't, there is a single question I have included in the booklet with which I might set pairs against each other as it involves long term v short term aid.