In the past I have taught Plate Tectonics to Year 13, Year 10 and Year 9 students. geographyalltheway.com hosts Plate Tectonics resources aimed for IGCSE/GCSE (15-16 years old) and Year 9 (13-14 years old) students.
I am now teaching Plate Tectonics to Year 8! I have redeveloped some of the existing resources to focus up terminology and a clear sequence of ideas. The new ‘What are Plate Tectonics?‘ resources can be found here.
I have started teaching at a new school where they teach a different programme of study from those I have experienced in the past.
The programme that the International School of Geneva Campus des Nations follows for Year 7 to 11 students is the IB Middle Years Programme. I will write some posts about the MYP once my understanding of it increases of the coming weeks.
As I teach the Humanities content I will be developing new resources for geographyalltheway.com. Some of these resources will be updated and reworked versions of existing geographyalltheway.com resources – others will be completely new.
The resource introduces weather related terminology, uses brainstorming, looks at some weather related news stories and uses some creative writing to link the terminology and the impact weather has upon our lives.
I have completed one of my big ICT jobs for the summer – geographyalltheway.com and some of my other sites/projects have been rehosted on rackspace cloud.
I think I have ironed out most of the bugs – but if you spot any – please let me know via the comment box that you will find onthe bottom of all pages of geographyalltheway.com.
In terms of development, next academic year I will be a Teacher of Humanities and IB Geography so expect some more humanities focused units and some materials for the new IB Geography syllabus.
Useful as a starter on transport or Globalization – if you click on the placemarks you can see the where the vessel is registered and it’s destination.
Digital Geography guru Noel Jenkins has added a 360° immersing panorama to 360cities.net of Sidmouth Seafront showing the various coastal defences – an excellent starter to a coastal management lesson.
It will great to see fellow educators on the workshop – if you have any questions please get in contact with me. All questions regarding booking etc need to be directed towards InThinking.
Workshop Objectives
To gain an overview of the online ICT opportunities available to Humanities educators.
To promote the use of ICT as a tool for sharing Humanities resources.
To gain an understanding of ways online tools/services can be used to make the life of a Humanities
educator easier.
To facilitate an evaluation of the use of wikis and blogs.
To review existing Google Earth and Google Map resources and their use in the Humanities classroom.
Session 1
30 ICT Ideas in 30 Minutes and Using ICT to Share. Starting with a ‘30 ICT ideas in 30 minutes’ presentation to
give an overview of opportunities available leading onto a ‘Using ICT to Share’ workshop focusing upon social
bookmarking and using online services such as Twitter, Slideshare and YouTube to share resources with your
students and fellow educators. Session 2
Online Tools to Make your Life Easier. A workshop session looking at Google Documents and Spreadsheets,
Google Forms and online mind mapping among other online tools. The focus of this workshop is using these
online services and tools effectively for teaching and learning in a Humanities classroom. Session 3
Blogs, Wikis and RSS Feeds. A workshop session looking at the use of teacher and student created blogs and
wikis. We will also cover the value of RSS feeds as a source of subject-based and ‘edtech’ information. Session 4
Google Earth isn’t just for Geographers! Workshop focused on making the most of existing geographical and
historical visualization resources in Google Earth and Google Maps. What resources are available and how best
could they be used?
To fully access the opportunities this ICT focused workshop provides you will need to bring a wifi enabled laptop.
The laptop should run a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox and have the latest version of Google Earth
installed. The ‘Humanities’ element of this workshop comes from the focus of the examples that will be used as
central themes.
I recently co-lead a three day workshop for Experienced IB Geography Teachers with Natasha Winnard of ibgeog.net, IB Geography 2009-2017 Wiki and OCC fame. We were running the course for InThinking in a hotel in central Paris. We had 26 participants from 9 different countries and the feedback we received was excellent. The main purpose of the workshop was to prepare for the new IB Geography syllabus – teaching of which starts this summer but sharing teaching strategies and new approaches was also a key theme.
For the penultimate session I gave a presentation called ‘60 Slides, 60 Ideas for IB Geography Teachers in 60 Minutes’ as a summary of 60 ideas that teacher could use in the Geography classroom to benefit themselves (by making their lives easier) or to benefit their students. The rationale is not that every participant tries to implement all 60 ideas – I just hope that everybody learnt something new and now has plans to have a go at a couple of ‘new’ things over the next couple of months. I have embedded the presentation below – obviously it’s better when seen ‘live’!
CNN have a webpage of video clips. These video clips can be embedded into blogs and websites. There is also a RSS feed so you can keep track of the new videos (there seems to be quite a few a day) with your RSS Reader.
