Thursday 27 August 2009

More congratulations!!

More congratulations - this time to the Year 11 geographers who achieved a FANTASTIC set of results... A*-C grades for 73% of the group... Very very well done!!

Photo ChrisIrmo (Flickr)

Good luck to those of you going elsewhere, and I look forward to seeing lots of you again in the AS Geography group in September!!

Wednesday 26 August 2009

I hope you'd be able to do better than this...

I have made a point of avoiding Big Brother, but a fellow geography teacher has just pointed this out... (Click on the A Wonder of the World link)... And if you can't do better, get the globe or the atlas out and spend the last week of your holidays practising, if only so that you don't show yourself up on a reality TV show!!

Thursday 20 August 2009

Congratulations!

Congratulations to the Year 12 and 13 geographers who received some very good exam results today, as a result of lots of hard work.

Photo ChrisIrmo (Flickr)

The very best of luck to Year 13... even those of you who are not doing Geography at uni ;-) Keep in touch, come back and visit (the blog and the dept!) and don't forget to send me some good geographical photos from all your adventures!

Wednesday 5 August 2009

Weather....

Not the greatest of weather for this time of year at the moment, but what is quite great is this new Met Office/Google Maps mashup...

The "Weather Visualisation" is part of Invent, which is the Met Office's showcase of some of their plans for new ways to present weather information and forecasts, and allows you to turn a variety of layers (the one above shows the rainfall forecast for 10.00am today) on and off, and also to view forecast and weather warning information for specific regions.

Thanks to Ollie Bray for the tipoff.

Tuesday 4 August 2009

An experiment...

I've been thinking for a while about the potential for using mobile phones in lessons, and planning to try out some ideas next year... One of which, is getting you to use mobile phones to respond to polls/answer questions, using something like Poll Everywhere (thanks Ollie Bray).

Good idea?? Text your response to the number below. (It will cost your usual text message rate... which might be nothing, depending on your contract, etc.)

Google Timeline

I think that this feature has been about for a while now, but I have only just discovered (via Tom Barrett on Twitter) Google Timeline... Essentially, you type in your search term as usual, but can then view a timeline of the results...

This was my first try... What do you think the search term was??

Saturday 1 August 2009

Happy Yorkshire Day!

(Image: Flickr user The Killer Biscuit)

Should the Met Office be sued?

Yes, according to the author of this article from The Times. Earlier this year, the Met Office announced that we were in for a "barbecue summer"... But there has not been much evidence of that so far - in fact, it's been quite the opposite!

The Met Office revised their forecast earlier this week, claiming that they had only said that there was a 65% chance of a hot summer, and that the media had mis-reported the seasonal forecast. Here is their response to the recent criticism they've received...

Nice article here, with some excellent photos.... Kayaking round a campsite anyone?