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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 images on GeoJuice include connections to some of the best sources of free images for geographers on the web.

The GeoJuice web site is accompanied by CDs containing a ready-made archive of images of a particular country, region or theme. All of the rights managed “GeoCom” and “GeoJuice” images / graphics (high-res 900x600 jpegs - just right for dropping into presentations) are carried on the CD-ROM.

The CDs contain additional images and also large tiffs for marketing and worksheet purposes.

 

Welcome to GeoJuice (click to change image)


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!

 
         
Site News  
         
 

Spring is now certainly in the air. The snow has melted and the garden is burgeoning. It has been a long winter but hopefully it is over. Work on the China CD is progressing - the diagrams are taking forever I’m afraid, but the end result will be worth it. I’m not so happy with the quality of the limestone scenery images. It rained the whole time I was in Guilin and Yangshuo so I’ve got some very moody art photography but not a lot of good teaching images, so I’m using this as an excuse to return to China after the Easter holidays when the fares become reasonable again and hopefully before the rains start in May. It’s about time my wife tasted China anyway! We’ll also be able to drop in and say hello to Chris Durbin in Hong Kong, which will be great. I’ve started putting up the 600x400 China archive on the web so you can get a flavour of what is coming.

Directories
The directories for CD1, 2 and 3 are now available as pdfs under the “News and Features” heading in the navigation column. You can also, if you wish, print off a copy for your departmental resources file.

GeoNews
Over the winter, subscribers should have received “GeoNews” items (960x720 slides) on the fluctuating price of oil, the Russian gas crisis, the Aussie drought and bush fires, the London snowfall and the current global financial crisis. Slides on the effects of this recession on developing countries and on the “carnage in the car industry”, as well as recent earthquake and volcanic eruption events have also been e-mailed to subscribers. Some subscribers haven’t supplied their e-mail addresses so I’m sorry but I can’t supply them with GeoNews. Please e-mail me to remedy this. Everyone takes time off to keep the kids up to date with world events but it is often difficult to provide decent visual aids. Hopefully the GeoNews items will be helpful. Some examples are shown on the right. Nearly every school that I visit these days has a LCD display in the foyer. Find out who controls what gets shown on this monitor and offer to supply a GeoNews powerpoint loop or video loop to show on the monitor. Salt in some pictures of your students’ recent work / fieldwork and make sure that your loop is running when parents’ nights are on!

The double page spread image in the centre of the Guardian continues to provide the best ammunition for static “Geography in the News” displays in the corridor. Aerial views of Koubigou refugee camp in eastern Chad, the Abruzzo earthquake and the Laxiwa Dam on the Yellow River (Huang He) were the pick of the recent offerings. The Guardian must pay a fortune for these pictures and yet they rarely figure on their website. I have suggested to them that they institute an “image of the day” slot, similar to NASA’s excellent “Earth Observatory” or even the Chicago Tribune’s image of the day, but to no avail so far. Even a 600x400 would be useful to have. The best exemplar of digital “geonews” to date is at the Boston Globe – simply wonderful!

www.boston.com/bigpicture/


China - Resources
Note also that some slides from the China presentations that have been completed so far - “population change”, “economic growth” and the “Three Gorges Reservoir area” - are also on the GeoJuice site now, and geographers may also find the abbreviated, composite presentation on Slideshare quite useful. There are 123 presentation slides (960x720s) in the vault on CD4 so far.

www.slideshare.net/aland/slideshows/

Staying with China, the best images on the Olympic Games in China probably are to be found on the Newsweek site. I particularly like the shot of the cloud seeding armoury. They don’t look like silver iodide shells to me! Great for “Weather and Climate” with S3.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/148844

One of the widest range of graphs and diagrams on China is to be found on the IIASA website.

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/
ChinaFood/data/t_data_1.htm


The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis is a unique non-governmental, non-profit, global change research institute. At the present time the institute is researching China’s food supply and provide a plethora of tables, charts, diagrams, maps and animations on China’s Population, Diet Change, Urbanization, Cultivated Land, Water and Technology. The animations have already “popped up” on several geography sites and blogs. This is where they came from. The maps and animations are the work of G K Heilig. A CD of the in-depth analyses, detailed maps, and many of the larger tables and figures is available for order ($39).

More “Free” Resources

The Planet Earth site has put up more “copyright free” presentations for teachers to improve our earth science teaching. The new themes are: Oil and Gas; Geological Time; Ice Ages; The History of Life; and Evolution. First class.

www.earth4567.com


I was fortunate enough to be invited to give talks to the Ayr and Helensburgh RSGS centres during the winter. It was magic to meet up with so many “well-kent” faces - Jim Stewart, Ian Geddes and Margaret Neville to name but three. The welcoming atmosphere in both venues was superb and the “craik” in the pub in Ayr was brilliant (Swapping info about mountains, short-eared owls and creosote plants!). Jim had fallen off his bike earlier that day but he still looked good. The fees from the two talks also mean that I’ve got enough money to print CD4 professionally, so thank you guys.

Congratulations are in order for Nicolina Georgieva from Bulgaria. She was the winner of the Geography Poster Competition which SAGT ran for the IGU conference in Glasgow in 2004. Nicolina enjoyed Scotland so much that she has decided to come and take her degree here. Well, it was Malcolm McAskill who showed her round Glasgow! Thanks Malcolm. (You did us all proud - as ever. ) So I’m looking forward to meeting Nicolina again in the autumn.

Congratulations are also in order for Gordon Lobban. Last year, he and his wife, Helen led a joint excursion from Trinity Academy and Beeslack HS to Japan. The kids had a great time and made such an impression on their teachers upon their return that Gordon had a delegation from them asking if he would organise a similar trip for them. So he and Helen are off to Japan again for the sakura. It was Gordon who introduced me to Japan back in 1990, so this must be about his sixth visit. Geography in action! Well done, sir.
Congratulations also to the team of four Spanish teenage students and their teacher from IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia who launched a weather probe they designed and built themselves. Their helium-filled balloon carried a payload of electronics and a camera to take atmospheric measurements and photographs throughout the trip. After getting permission from aviation officials and getting good weather, they released the probe on a trip that took it over 30,000 meters (19 miles) above sea level, through winds gusting up to 100 kph, and temperatures reaching -54C (-65.2F), and traveling 38 kilometers overland in a time of 2 hours and 10 minutes. The Meteotek08 team has collected their images and data on both their blog and flickr page. Well done lads!

Congratulations finally to RSGS on the “refreshing” of their newsletter / magazine - “The Geographer” (Great title!). Twenty pages, full colour, a bit of design, competently desktop published and some cracking articles. I particularly liked the “What Geography Means to Me” column and the Greenland article. Relevant and useful. Jim Hansom and his team have also done a great job with “The Scottish Geographical Journal” as well. Well done, RSGS. Enjoy!

 

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