Cultural Geography Blog

In early November  (later this week in fact), I'm going to be heading down to Somerset for the Somerset Geography Conference. I'm doing a session on my KS3 Toolkit book on landscapes (with updates) and ideas about teaching about landscapes. This will include mentions of the White Cliffs of Dover, Ash dieback, Brave and other Pixar films, burger boxes, Google Earth and other things.... The conference has been developed with a lot of work from Noel Jenkins, who has put together a great line-up for the conference. Sadly, like the SAGT conference at the weekend (see separate blog post), Iain Stewart was unable to attend as he had been allowed permission to film in Turkmenistan, which apparently is rare, but had to be this week. Don't forget that this award-winning Toolkit book has a blog to support it - as with many of my books, such as the Badger GCSE book which has its own blog HERE. If you can't make that event, you now have the option to join me for a virtu...

The RGS-IBG 's flagship journal ' Geographical' is now in its 84th volume.... The November issue has a touch of Mission Explore about it. First of all, there's a rather good review of our Mission:Explore Food book, which suggests that 'every classroom should have a copy'. There is also an excellent interview with Dan Raven Ellison. Read an extra online bit that's not in the magazine here too for some interesting ideas about new geographies. Available from all good newsagents...

Another trial with a Spotify Embed... I love this piece of music...

Do you have plans for August 2013 ? If not, you might consider a visit to INDIA, organised by Ben King and the folks at SANGAM. Details are HERE. TEACHERS’ STUDY VISIT TO SOUTHERN INDIA (August 16th-28th 2013) Teachers from all phases of education are invited to visit Southern India to:  Increase their first-hand experience of a different country and culture, including visits to a variety of different schools  Experience a wide range of environments, including the rapidly developing city of Bangalore and the surrounding rural landscape  Enrich many curriculum subjects, particularly Geography, History, Art, RE, Music & Food Technology  Strengthen the global dimension within their schools and gather resources to enrich teaching and learning. What will this visit offer? Our main objective is to enable a group of no more than 10 teachers to learn at first-hand about this  very different and rapidly developing country, with its range of cultur...

Seems Cultcha is on this list... which is nice... If you've followed the link from here, you're welcome. There's hundreds of posts here, but there are thousands of posts (over 4000) on my main Living Geography blog too.... One of the other blogs on the list: Edible Geography had a recent post about a Kickstarter projec t to fund a Food Atlas. I've funded this project.  The atlas is due to have a section produced by the Geography Collective , of which I am a founder member. We're the creators of Mission:Explore Food. This was also crowdfunded. I've written lots about food over the years.... Finally, while we're at it, my former colleague Anne Greaves directed me to World Tattoo , which is an interesting geographical story..

The Atlas by Collins is now available for download at a promotional price of £6.99 The app needs an iPhone 4 or above, and an iPad 2 or above (sadly my first generation iPad was unable to run the app) This is a 'proper' app, by which I mean a lot of time and effort has gone into making it look and feel right on the devices it is designed for, as well as potentially replace a paper-based product. Collins are famous for producing the 'Times Atlas of the World' which is perhaps the definitive atlas, and so any new product has to retain that pedigree. It's also a proper app in term of its size. You'll need over 600 Mb of space as well as processing power. The app is designed to be used offline for maximum flexibility, but also has an option to go online and fetch further Google imagery if the user zooms-in past the maximum scale that the app already has pre-loaded. This makes it a useful resource to have on a library iPad for example, or as a suite/folder...

A nice bit of Facebook 'friends' mapping... Which countries are the most 'friendly' with others ? Choose a country to see where the connections are made... Can you guess who Brazil, Australia or the USA's 'friends' are before you click on them, for example ?? Thanks to Karl Donert for the tipoff...

Thanks to the colleagues who joined me for last night's VITAL CPD Teachshare on fieldwork in Geography The spine presentation I used is here... Fieldwork for VITAL from GeoBlogs There were some interesting discussions, and a few things to follow up on after the event, particularly an idea about teachers undertaking personal fieldwork in order to be able to communicate more effectively about places they are teaching about.... You can also watch and listen to the replay here. For some reason my presentation didn't display during the Teachshare itself... A few things that I mentioned during the session: Enhancing Fieldwork Learning  project Previous Teachshare with Paul Cornish and his Madagascar fieldtrip  (link to PREZI) We also mentioned the Coach's Eye and Comic Life apps for fieldwork. Worth reminding you of Paul Turner' s nice poster image too for more fieldwork apps....

Food narratives.... Don't forget that it's WORLD FOOD DAY on the 16th of October 2012 ( today, if you're reading this on the day it was posted...) You can get f ree CC licensed versions of chapters from Mission:Explore Food here... Hugh has done a lot to promote sustainable fishing with his FISH FIGHT website - don't forget the resource I produced with Digital Explorer on this topic. You need to download this booklet if you haven't already... Other food resources I've written are on the GA website under Online CPD. There are also plenty of food related resources and stories out there... The Guardian talks about the growing number of children who arrive in school hungry , and there is also growing use of FOOD BANKS. The Trussell Trust (who feature in the GA have reported that over 100 000 people have used them in the last six months). The Guardian Datablog has data on the use of Food Banks Check out CSI Food too on food fakery... Finally,...

A flaneur is a wanderer: the term is linked to the idea of psychogeography.... The ROBOT FLANEUR wanders randomly through a city of your choice and displays Street View images... Made by James Bridle Explore the following cities: London San Francisco Manhattan Sao Paulo Paris Berlin Johannesburg Tokyo City Mexico Via Urban Photo Blog on Twitter I can think of lots of ways of using this to explore urban geography and comparisons between cities in different parts of the world... A sort of slighty redacted and randomised version of MAPCRUNCH , my session starter of choice...

I've written a few things for the Times Educational Supplement . One of them was published today, on the theme of Geographies of Food.  It came with a nice punning title too, which is always a bonus. The article can be read HERE if you don't have the paper... There are links to GA Online CPD , Mission Explore Food chapters and Oxfam's GROW campaign. There's also a link here, with thanks to Madeleine from the RGS-IBG to the Presidential Address by Michael Palin that I referred to in the piece. Click the link for a PDF download of the speech.

At the GA Conference in April 2012 at the University of Manchester, all delegates were given the chance to pick up a Follow the Things bag. Follow the Things is a project involving Ian Cook and colleagues at the University of Exeter. The site explores the connections between consumers in the UK and elsewhere and the unseen others who manufacture their products. It looks at supply chains, transportation and globalisation. As part of some proposed work that is going to take place in 2013, we'd like to know what you did with your bag. In the most recent GA NEWSLETTER ( be sure to subscribe to make sure that you received yours) there is a request for further information. What did you do with your bag ?  How are you using it ?  Have you followed the weblink on the bag to visit the site ? Please let me know by commenting here, tweeting me @GeoBlogs, or e-mailing me.... We'll let you know the results in a few months...

You can now download a special PDF 'version' of the Mission:Explore Food book that we've produced for the National Geographic Education team's materials for Geography Awareness Week. It focuses on the theme of Interdependence. Link (PDF download - 5Mb) It's really rather tasty....

At the end of last year, and start of this year, I worked on a major writing project to create resources / teacher notes and activities to accompany TWIG Geography films. These films won a BETT Award at the start of the year TWIG is now free on GLOW: the Scottish intranet. Twig is an award winning multi-media comprehensive learning resource mapped to Curriculum for Excellence. Explore over 800 short films and 200 learning packs, including brand new content on maths and geography Save time and strengthen pupils' understanding of key concepts Browse content by  Curriculum for Excellence Outcomes and Experiences Download extensive  support materials  including quizzes, questions and transcripts If you know a Scottish teacher let them know, and if you are a Scottish teacher... you now know....

While at Dusseldorf airport a few days ago,  I ate a banana. I noticed that it had a sticker on it. I visited the website that was mentioned and discovered a rather fine resource for geography teachers which could also make a good cross-curricular MFL project in schools where German is used as a language. Just remember to turn off the browser translation settings... Dole Earth takes you to the farms where the bananas are grown. My banana was grown on farm number 10265 so in the absence of a banana, use that code. Visit the website and you'll find a rather nice farm tour with ambient sounds and plenty of useful information. Image: Alan Parkinson