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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