Cultural Geography Blog

A new resource has gone up on the GA website. It's a short unit with associated resources which explores the issue of Polish migration and the decisions that people make about where to live. Download the FREE RESOURCE as a PDF Coincidentally this resource has a link with Torun , where I shall be next week. I'm going to see what the Polish delegates make of it :) If we can get some additional Polish perspective I think that would make a useful resource for colleagues with Polish students in their geography class or form group...

As I may have mentioned before on the blog, I did some work a few months ago for the Geography Collective on the theme of 'the local area'. This was for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC education in the USA, and Dan from the collective went over to Portland to speak to educators from all over the USA. Now there have been some videos released from the National Council for Geographic Education for the session that Dan Raven Ellison did for the conference, and they are on the GEOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE blog. Here's the first one and the other two are on the blog... This is very fine work, and explains the origins of the Geography Collective and our recent work, ideas of geography and showcases projects that Dan and the Collective have been involved with....

I received an e-mail today from David Lambert about developments towards the new curriculum... The Department for Education, through Nick Gibb has asked Alex Standish (some of you will be familiar with the name) to write a national curriculum for geography. The final draft has been made available to the GA, and shared on the website. Alex Standish is an assistant professor of geography at Western Connecticut State University and author of "Global Perspectives in the Geography Curriculum: Reviewing the moral case for geography", published by Routledge. The draft curriculum has been added to the GA Website Curriculum Consultation page as a 17 page PDF download.  (Click to download) Before you read the document, you should first read Alex's 'position statement' which sets out his thinking as he approached the task: "This geography curriculum was compiled at the request of the Department for Education as a contribution to the national curriculum ...

A new update to the VITAL website has been launched recently... It's the new website of VITAL: the Open University's CPD programme. One of the main aspects of the website is access to a series of subject specific PORTALS. The Geography Portal is yet to be launched, but it will be managed by me , and I am working on the content already. Expect there to be a range of useful content for geographers and geography teachers... This will include: short video guides to explain how to use key websites and web tools suggested Top Tips resource ideas Twitter feed details of events fortnightly online meetings to discuss a particular topic I'll let you know when the portal launches, so that you can pop along and see me...

Thanks to Matt Podbury via the SLN Geography Forum for the tip-off here... The MERKADOR blog which I think is based in Belgium has shared some great work for geography of sport units. There are 2 Google Earth related projects... The first refers to the English Premiership. This content overlay shows the origin of the first team players of the 4 biggest clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United. You can see the geographical composition of the teams in 3 ways: click on the team emblems to see a pie chart of the players nationalities check out the lines connecting the team emblems to the players countries of origin. Broader lines mean more players come from that particular country. Enable and disable the clubs you want to visualize in the table of content click on the flag icons of the countries to see what players originate from a particular country The second one is more ambitious and targets all the clubs that were involved in the World Cup 2010 ...

I was contacted recently by Steve VanderLeest to let me know about the JigsawGeo app for iPhone. It's produced by SquishLogic and is available on the App Store. Steve told me about the apps, which are for a range of different continents and areas. They would be good to have on a class iPod Touch (or set if they were available) The apps were developed with feedback from a Grade 5 class studying geography.  The students took their review seriously and gave us many great comments, which we implemented in revisions to our app.  The result is a great game that provides beautiful maps, teaches elementary kids (and adults) the geography of important areas of the world, and is fun too.   High scores get posted to our website so you can see how you stack up against the competition.  We take privacy seriously, especially for kids, so we ask that they only post their first name and we only indicate the state or region that the player is from (nothing more specific)....

Later this month, the Open University and e-Skills UK's VITAL professional development programme is launching a range of subject specialist portals for a number of key subjects, including English and Literacy, History, Maths and Numeracy, Modern Foreign Languages, Music and eSafety. I am delighted to announce that from later this month,   I will be the manager of the Geography portal. I shall provide more details of the URL and other aspects of the work later this month when they start to go live. I'm delighted to be associated with VITAL , and will be serving up a rang of services for visitors to the portal. For those who are unsure of Vital's role. Delivered by the Open University and funded by DfE, Vital provides: inspiring ideas to inspire your learners materials you can use in your own classroom opportunities to share expertise with your peers What does Vital offer? flexible, cost-effective courses that fit with your busy schedule case studi...