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GeoJuice is an image bank, designed to celebrate the geography of our planet. It is aimed primarily at geography teachers but should be of interest to most people. Each image is accompanied by a narrative, which is in turns, descriptive, explanatory and confrontational.

The GeoJuice web site is accompanied by CDs containing a ready-made archive of images of a particular country, region or theme. The CDs contain 900x600 images (stock), 960x720 slides (vault) and also presentations. Subscription details are to be found in the “our services” section in the navigation bar on the left.

Our planet is awesome. Geography teachers are awesome! Celebrate and enjoy!

 


Subscription details, back copies of the SAGT journals and free Curriculum for Excellence posters are all to be found in the “our services” section in the navigation bar on the left. Our planet is awesome. Geography teachers are awesome! Celebrate and enjoy!

 
         
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GeoJuice News - Winter Feb 2010

The myth of “Death by PowerPoint”
“Death by PowerPoint” doesn’t exist. Death by poor preparation does. It is people who can be boring, not technology. Technology (and graphic design) are famously neutral. Visual learning and teaching can be enhanced by the application of technology and graphic design or suffocated by their misuse. The hardware involved is innocent. The suspect software involved must always be employed in a reflective, questioning mode to ensure that a presentation is successful. When the presentation can be described as a conversation, then you know that you’ve done the business. It should also be prepared in advance with a view to saving time and effort from the student rather than the presenter.

Reflective Practice in Geography Teaching (ed. Ashley Kent, PCP 2000) encouraged teachers to reflect on the development and nature of their subject and the teaching styles and strategies which we employed in the quest for learning. A decade further on, it is now time to revisit these styles and strategies and assess what works and what doesn’t in terms of all three of the main ingredients of our presentations - content, graphic design and technology. If you are attending the GA conference in Derby, come along and join in the conversation!

iSpy an iPad
The war of attrition between Adobe and Apple has just plumbed new depths with the advent of the iPad - a tablet computer, for reading books and watching videos, which does not support flash. These companies must be run by Northern Ireland politicians!

No Flash, no USB, no card reader? No sale. Love the battery and the map app though. Keep working on it, Steve.

Congratulations, Caitlin!
Caitlin Sutherland, a student at St Margaret’s High School, Livingston, has won the National Geographic’s UK Youth Photographic Competition with the image of a poppy on the right. Caitlin and her parents are off on safari in Kenya later this year as her prize and her image is now automatically entered into the National Geographic’s International Photographic Competition. Well done Caitlin and good luck for the next round! Cracking picture!

The Big Freeze - December 2009 to January 2010
Subscribers to GeoJuice received additional “GeoNews” images to go with the PowerPoint which I uploaded to Slideshare as the snow began to melt. (Note how it is the dirtiest piles of snow in the streets and carparks that are lasting the longest. A useful observation to quiz the kids on. Vertical wastage of ice and ablation till in action.) “The Big Freeze” is the third GeoJuice presentation to be featured on the Slideshare home page which is not bad for a geography presentation. We usually don’t get a look-in. A 1000 hits in the first week isn’t bad going either.The button on the right allows you to peruse the presentation which can be downloaded at

http://www.slideshare.net/aland/the-big-freeze-2009-2010

As I searched for jet stream maps for the North Atlantic, I discovered that the Met Office charge for such info. Not a lot, but too much if you are a teacher looking for resources for a small part of a lesson. (GeoJuice is much better value!) Fortunately San Francisco State University runs the California Regional Weather Server site which provides the data for free. They only put up the last four days at a time so you have to collect them as the weather event progresses.

http://www.slideshare.net/aland/the-big-freeze-2009-2010

The jet stream rarely gets a mention in TV and radio forecasts, which is something that we can remedy in our lessons.

Iceland is indeed the land of ice
I have at long last got round to processing some of the Iceland images from 2008 for the website. The better efforts are going into the presentations for CD5. Ablation, in particular makes a lot more sense to the students when they can “see” the process and the resultant chaos on on ice margin for themselves. “Disintegration moraine” is also a feature which should be added to their vocabulary. Just leave the relevant slides out if you disagree. The button on the right will allow you to browse the presentation which is available for download at

http://www.slideshare.net/aland/glaciation-the-landscape-of-ablation

Check out the additions to the Iceland section by following the link on the left. A word of thanks is also due to Ashley and Paul Fenwick, Martin Hoar and Piotr Angiel who have all contributed images to CD5 and the archive.

Ordnance Survey - The Final Push?
There is still time to register your opinions on the policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey, as outlined in their consultation document which is available for download at

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications
/corporate/ordnancesurveyconsultation


I get the feeling that given the slightest let up in the campaign for freeing up data, the Ordnance Survey would happily retain their present business plan and stuff education.
The prospect of being able to download (for free) 1:25,000 raster layers to use in Google sketch up or whatever is really quite appealing but I don’t think that this is going to happen without a bit more pressure so if you can find the time, please put in your tuppence worth.

Manchester’s Urbis metamorphoses yet again!
I loved the visually striking building and the urban design displays when Urbis first opened in 2002. A lot of Scottish students have shared the same positive experience as more and more Scottish geography departments included Manchester in their fieldwork itineraries. Urbis’ presentations were driven more and more by popular culture as well as urban design but it was mixture which appealed to youngsters and last year was probably Urbis’s most successful. A quarter of a million visitors a year, however, was not enough for Manchester City Council and in summer 2011 the centre will reopen its doors as a museum of football. Well, you don’t know what you’ve lost till its gone. How true.

China CD4 update
China has admitted to having a problem - too many cars. Beijing wishes to regain its reputation as the “Kingdom of Bicycles”. The latest five year plan includes the restoration of bicycle lanes and new rental programmes providing 50,000 bikes for hire by 2015. Since the 2008 Olympics, traffic congestion has returned. The number of cars in Beijing has increased by more than 25% in the last four years to pass the 4 million mark.
Improvements in conditions for cyclists in Beijing are like the plans in Shanghai for the carbon neutral new town of Chengqiao. Believe it when you see it.
The development of web narratives continues. Check out “Journey to the end of coal”, a long web documentary published on a French television website (France 5) in autumn 2008 and now one of the finalists at the “Visa pour l’Image” photojournalism festival. Just brilliant.

http://doclab.voyageauboutducharbon.com/

“Geography is the new history. We’re living it now.”
It is not often that publications eulogise our subject but Robert Butler’s article, The Rest is Geography, which is in the winter volume of The Economist’s “Intelligent Life” magazine, does exactly that. It is the best piece of marketing copy that I have come across for some time and is well worth a perusal.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/
robert-butler/going-green-rest-geography


It is interesting that Robert Macfarlane, a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and lecturer in English, admitted recently that the geography department is where things are really happening. I do hope that Ian Jardine, Scottish Natural Heritage’s chief executive, listens to the two Roberts and reappraises his educational support strategy. The best “poetry” is being produced by geographers. Help us spread the word, Ian. For example, SNH is producing interpretative plaques for landscape features in National Nature Reserves, National Parks, SSSIs, etc. SNH pays for the graphics and then only uses them for the plaque and possibly some print form. It would cost very little to turn these graphics into presentation slides and put them on an archive for teachers to download for inclusion in their lessons - Biology, Geography, English and so on. How about it, Ian?
A big thank you to Robert Butler and Robert Macfarlane for their honest observations. Much appreciated.

You can never have too many images to choose from so SAGT’s Flickr site is a welcome addition to our armoury. Well worth a visit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sagt/

If it is diagrams that you are looking for then check out the Guardian Flickr site. The Guardian has the enlightened policy of encouraging mash-ups of their statistics and diagrams. Well worth a rummage.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/guardiandatastore/

 

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