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Deliciously delicious

Resources for a 5 minute ICT input at Curriculum Leaders Meeting, International School of Toulouse, 16th September 2008.

What is it?

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Because it is web-based you can easily share your bookmarks between the different computers that you may use.

Sign up?

Sign up page.

Buttons and Toolbars

These are worth installing as they make your life much easier.

Tags

It is very important to tag the sites that you bookmark - the more tags the better.

Example website: BBC News: Huge split in child death rate

Tags: ib igcse population mortality news_feed

You can then combine tags when searching.  For example: my tags (geographyalltheway) ib+population+mortality

Tags are very powerful as you can also view RSS feeds from individual tags etc - just ask if you would like to know more about this.

Networks

Having a network allows you to share resources.  When you tag a site you are also given the opportunity to tag that site for a member of your network.  Members of the IST staff with delicious accounts include:

Richard Allaway

Russel Tarr

James Palmer

David Faure

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Last Week > Next Week

I’m a little late doing this, this week!

Last Week

Year 7 Geography

Continued with the ‘Induction Unit‘. The ‘When and Who Geography‘ proved to be an interesting baseline assessment of their research and ICT skills.

Year 9 Geography

I continued to develop the Energy Resources unit as I teach it.  A big thank you to Kathleen Noreisch who sent me some resources based on ‘peak oil‘ after reading last weeks blog post.  The lesson went really well.  The resources can be found here - Running Out?.

Year 10 IGCSE Geography

The Demographic Transition Model and Ageing Populations were covered.

Year 11 IGCSE Geography

Levées and Floodplains and an MEDC Flooding case study were covered.

Year 12 IB Geography

Second week of the Induction Programme saw the students hand in their detailed disease case studies and start work on their presentations.  They were also informed that they would complete an exam question to finish off the Induction Unit.

Year 13 IB Geography

Covered slightly less than planned - looking at Poverty and Development Indicators.

Next Week

Year 7 Geography

The final week of the ‘Induction Unit‘ will include ‘Why Geography‘ and then some finishing off.

Year 9 Geography

The Energy Resource continues to develop as I teach the unit.  This week the students will look at managing energy demand using Electocity and then look at Biofuels, focusing on the what are they and how they generate press attention.

Year 10 IGCSE Geography

Youthful Populations and HIV/AIDS.

Year 11 IGCSE Geography

Flood Management and River Fieldwork.  The River Fieldwork work acts as revision for the fluvial processes part of this unit plus add knowledge and understanding necessary to the ‘Alternative to Coursework’ IGCSE Geography exam.

Year 12 IB Geography

Will finish the Induction Unit by giving presentations and completing an exam question.  Peer assessment will be used with the presentations using Google Forms as a way of collating feedback.  We will then start the course proper - looking at Population Distribution to start with.

Year 13 IB Geography

Started the week with an excellent whole class game of Top Trumps.  This week we will complete Development Indicators, Patterns of Development and the Rostow Development Model.  The Rostow Development Model page of geographyalltheway.com has been redeveloped to include a living graph exercise.

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Where in the World? Week 92

Each week a new image is added to the homepage of geographyalltheway.com. If you can name the country from the image enter the competition!

The competition is open to everybody - the winner being chosen from all the correct answers received. The winner receives a unique certificate via email.

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The Wonderful World of Widgets

Over the last week I have been playing with widgetbox.com.

Widgetbox is a service that enables people to “find, make and distribute web widgets for blogging, social networking services, and personal websites”.  I have been doing some very simple things by turning RSS feeds into widgets.  The reason to make widgets is to make content easier to access for my students and virtual colleagues.

Here is an example taking the feed from this site:

The more ’serious’ ones I have done are for my IB Geography and IGCSE Geography students.  I have created feeds of recent, relevant news stories. The widgets can be seen on the following pages of this blog: IB Geography Widgets and IGCSE Geography Widgets - which can be accessed by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page.

They have been created by taking feeds from my delicious tags:

geographyalltheway's Bookmarks on Delicious
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The widgets can be embedded into blogs, webpages, iGoogle pages, myspace, facebook etc - which means they can be very accessible for students.

Here is a final (for today) widget that took just 90 seconds to produce - you should recognise it - it’s the feed from Alan’s Living Geography blog:

If you have any questions about these - or you would like me to create a widget for you - just ask via the comments box.

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OSC IB Geography Revision Guide - Are you using it?

Do you use the IB Geography Paper 1 revision guide?

The publishers are after some quotes about it’s use for their website.

So if you would like to leave a comment here or send me a quote via email (Contact Me button in the top right hand corner of the page) that would be great.  I’m sure their could be a geographyalltheway.com pen for the best quote used!

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geogalot is back up for all th…

geogalot is back up for all those who noticed it was down due to ‘technical’ issues.

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Where in the World? Widget

I have had a go at creating a widget using widgetbox.com.

You can grab the code here to add the widget to you blog/website.  The idea being that it should up date each week with the new Where in the World? image.

There is a wide version:

and a narrow version:

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YouTube: BBC - If The Oil Runs Out

The BBC docudrama ‘If The Oil Runs Out‘ is currently on available on YouTube, cut into 6 sections.  I have added them all together to using playlist - see below.  There is a good chance that it will not be on YouTube for ever!

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Where in the World? Week 91

Each week a new image is added to the homepage of geographyalltheway.com. If you can name the country from the image enter the competition!

The competition is open to everybody - the winner being chosen from all the correct answers received. The winner receives a unique certificate via email.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Last Week > Next Week

So this is the second ‘Last Week > Next Week’ post.  The last one is here.

Last Week

Year 7 Geography

The new Year 7s have had a positive start.  They are all currently deciding upon at least 8 places that are important for them as part of ‘Where Geography?‘.

Year 9 Geography

Again a positive start - hitting the floor running.  The revision of Energy Resources went well.  I have really tried to focus their presentations with the skills of giving presentations and constructing effective slides.  This video clip has helped discussions:

Life After Death by PowerPoint

Year 10 IGCSE Geography

Having just eight students in this group this year means I have the ability to really focus upon each student.  I went straight into the Population Structure unit and the atmosphere has been very productive.

Year 11 IGCSE Geography

Trying to get the River Processes unit finished.  Two sections completed as planned.

Year 12 IB Geography

Induction unit has progressed with a couple of hiccups due to the network firewall etc.  All students now using delicious to help then research a disease for their case studies.

Year 13 IB Geography

A steady start to the finial section of the Core - Development.  Some really interesting discussions about what development is and global disparities in wealth when looking at the Millennium Development Goals.

Next Week

Year 7 Geography

Will be using a lesson to complete their ‘Where Geography‘ Google Earth Tours and then a lesson looking at ‘When and Who Geography‘ and the research skills associated with the set tasks.

Year 9 Geography

One lesson will be spent watching the student’s Energy Resource presentations.  I will be using ClassTools.net’s excellent Random Name Picker to select the order of the students.  I will also be uploading the presentations to slideshare.net for feedback.  The second lesson of the week will look at Peak Oil and the ‘running out’ of fossil fuels.  This lesson is still under-development!

Year 10 IGCSE Geography

We will be looking at the Demographic Transition Model and then I haven’t decided whether to do ‘Jelly Baby Geography‘ now or at the end of the unit as revision.  If we don’t have any Jelly Baby or Smarties based fun we will be looking at Ageing Populations.

Year 11 IGCSE Geography

We are still looking at the Lower Course of the river.  Levées and Floodplains and a MEDC Flooding case study this week.  Students have completed a LEDC Flooding case study as their summer work.

Year 12 IB Geography

The Induction unit continues with the students having their disease case studies completed by the end of the week.  I will also add some skills associated with organising their tasks and time - the use of RSS feeds, Remember the Milk, Google Alerts etc - this will require the students to have Google accounts.

Year 13 IB Geography

Poverty, Development Indicators and maybe even a start on Patterns in Development will mean a busy week for Year 13.  They are also doing a timed exam question - just a single 10 mark question - so about 23 to 25 minutes of writing during Wednesday’s lesson.  They will do one of these every fortnight - with me telling them the area of the course the question will be taken from a week before.

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