South Georgia!

It's been far too long since I've had a look at the fantastic South Georgia webcams... It's looking pretty cold and miserable there today, but there are plenty of seals about! Prize for the first SHS person to spot a penguin and send me a copy of the image with the date and time....



For those of you who've not yet seen the South Georgia webcams (why not?!), click on the South Georgia tag at the bottom of this post to find out more...

Happy Halloween

Celebrate Halloween by turning Google Earth into a giant pumpkin.... Click here to go to the GE Blog, and download the .kmz file from the link in the first paragraph. Thanks to Kenny O'Donnell for the tipoff.


This is also fun, though not especially geographical...

8BL - Earth as Art challenge...

Good morning 8BL! Your challenge for today is to use Google Earth to produce a fantastic piece of art work... Below are two of my favourite examples from last year's Year 8 groups, and you can see some of the others by clicking here.

To make your own...

1. Open Google Earth (Start, Swanwick Hall, Humanities, Google Earth).

2. Spend some time exploring, and find yourself a beautiful view.

3. Open a new Ppt presentation.

4. Back in Google Earth, make sure you are happy with your view (do you want to zoom in or out, or tilt it?), then take a screenshot (hold down Ctrl + press PrtScn).

5. Paste your screenshot into your Ppt slide.

6. Crop your screenshot until you are happy with it.

7. Right-click on your picture, and select "Save as picture..." Give your picture a sensible name, and save it in your user area (preferably in a Geography folder!). Check that the filetype (in the dropdown box below where you type the filename) is .png or .jpg.

8. Go to the Big Huge Labs website. Upload your picture, and then experiment with colours, etc. and give your work a caption.

9. When you are completely happy with it, click Create. Once your finished poster appears, you can either go back and edit it, or click Save. Save the file to your computer, giving it a filename that includes your name.

10. Open your school emails. Type vel into the address bar, and then attach your finished work (not the screenshot from your ppt). Send!

I am expecting two brilliant pieces of work from each pair, and we will have a look at everyone's work on Friday morning. Have fun!

Blog Action Day - Climate Change Conference

Today is Blog Action Day - where bloggers across the world blog about the same big issue... This year, it is climate change... So a good time to write about the Oxfam Climate Change Conference that I went to on Monday with two Yr11 and two Yr12 geographers.

Oxfam are running a series of conferences for young people in the run up to the Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December, and we were lucky enough to get places at the Birmingham Conference.

After an introduction to some of the impacts of climate change on communities in Malawi from Elvis (yes, really), the day was spent taking part in various workshops - looking at how to take action and plan events in the community, understanding some of the politics of climate change, and putting together a message for Gordon Brown to take to Copenhagen.

We all had an excellent day, and the girls came back with lots of ideas about "blue days", mini-Oxjam events and an eco-fest... Watch this space for more!

This is the fantastic collage that the girls put together to take to the conference (which was most definitely the best piece of work in the exhibition!):


And the "photo shoot" for the Derby Telegraph and Ripley & Heanor News...

People Powered Maps...

Most of you will, by now, have seen the fantastic Worldmapper maps, put together by a team of geographers from Sheffield University. (If you haven't, you should go and have a look now... And even if you have, go and have another look, as there are now almost 700 maps available.)

However, Professor Danny Dorling has been busy producing a new set of cartograms showing population density for various different countries. This is the UK one, and you can find out more about the project and look at some of the other maps in this BBC article, or view the full set of maps on the Worldmapper website:

Indonesian earthquake and Samoan tsunami

Lots of you have come into lessons over the past couple of days talking about the tsunami that struck Samoa and American Samoa and the series of earthquakes around the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

The events are still in the news, with international relief teams being flown in to help in the rescue and clean-up efforts.

The BBC has lots of information, images and video clips about both - with In Pictures series here for the tsunami and here for the earthquakes.

We picked up all the activity on our seismometer - I haven't managed to get screenshots of the seismographs yet, but when I do, I'll post them on the Swanwick Seismology blog here.

Svalbard

Some reminders for 8BL...

Laurel McFadden's Cold Photo blog...

Flickr

More Svalbard stuff here:

www.svalbard.net/
www.svalbard.com/

Dancing Matt...

I've posted about Dancing Matt before, but this is for the benefit of Year 8, especially 8BL, who enjoyed watching Matt's 2008 video this morning...



If you want to have a look at the other videos, including out-takes, and also check out maps and Google Earth files of where Matt has danced, they're all on his website here. (I have not read all of the comments on the website, or posted on the YouTube videos, and so I cannot guarantee that there aren't any rude words there.... If there are, I am very sorry!)

Journey Sticks...

My Nature Explorers group spent their first Enrichment session last week making some journey sticks... This was another great idea that I picked up from Twitter, and seems to be well-used in primary schools as a way of introducing maps. I've since found out though, that journey sticks began with aboriginal people who put them together when they went on long journeys, and then used them on their return as prompts when telling the rest of the tribe about their journeys.

Our journey was not so long - 40 minutes or so in the school grounds - but we were amazed at the number of interesting objects we managed to find...

Thanks to Miss Breider (former SHS student and prospective Geography teacher) for putting this brilliant display together!

The Climate Mystery...

Have a look at this and see if you can work out what's going on!

www.climatemystery.com

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!!

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!!

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!

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.

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.)

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

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??

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?

Disappearing Derby shops...

Some of the many boarded up shops in Derby which, according to a new report out today, has a retail vacancy rate of 22%. 19,000 independent shops and 7000 branches of chains have closed this year across the country, with Margate in Kent being worst affected, and Derby second. Although the recession is a major factor, the Westfield Centre - which opened in 2007 - has played its part.

More from the BBC here.

Buy local?

Year 8 have had some interesting discussions over the last term about food miles and the surrounding issues... including whether it's really always as straightforward as "the further it's travelled, the worse it is..." so I was interested to read this article about strawberries and tomatoes from Spain perhaps being better from an environmental point-of-view than local ones...

What do you think?