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Showing posts from April, 2018

Culture influencing place

A lovely Tweet with some details I hadn't heard before.... I wonder if there are other places that have similar road naming schemes, other than the usual prime ministers and trees. I remember doing a Mission:Explore Lowestoft project, where I found an estate where the streets were named after bird species, and put together a birdwatching / twitching mission you could do while sat on the bus... Fans of classic cars (especially British ones) will enjoy the street names of Jaywick, Essex. This plan of this seaside plotland village, begun in the 1930s, is said to be based on the shape of a car radiator grille. pic.twitter.com/dxXR3RFLbG — Tim Dunn (@MrTimDunn) April 27, 2018

Worldmapper: help support this essential tool

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The new Worldmapper website was launched at the GA Conference following months of investment of their own time and money from Ben Hennig and Tina Gotthardt. It is used in classrooms around the country (and beyond) and would be great to support them at this time. I'm amazed no geospatial company hasn't wanted to be involved in ensuring this remains free for all educators to use forever. The new mapping makes this an even more useful site, but as someone who used to run a website knows (albeit rather less useful), bandwidth and server costs aren't free... Let's see if as many geography teachers as possible can donate the price of a pint, or a skinny latte  (or more) to help payback for all the maps we've used over the years. As it says on the Worldmapper site: The new website is proving more popular than ever before. Unfortunately this has led to repeated server outages in recent days since the fresh new design and functionalities have considerably increased dem

Isle of Dogs

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I've been telling everyone I've seen for the last month that they have to go and see Wes Anderson's 'Isle of Dogs' . This is still showing in some cinemas as I write this blogpost, and is a real tour de force of creativity and filmmaking. It's a stop-motion animation which involved hundreds of people for a year and a half, and the creation of tens of thousand of bespoke props and different methods of filming at different scales. The story concerns the cat loving Kobayashi dynasty, and the fate of the Mayor's son and his dog, alongside a group of other dogs who have been exiled to Trash Island. My son and I visited the exhibition of sets and figures from the film, which had just opened at the time, and we were able to go in, and collect some memorabilia. We went to see it at Store X on the Strand in London, which was a temporary space. The exhibits, like the plane crash site above, were incredibly detailed and I loved the Taiko drummers who open the film.

When a city runs dry... IB Geography Conference preparation

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These are anxious times for the residents of Cape Town. They have been counting down to Day Zero : the day when the taps were due to be turned off, and they would have to rely on standpipes and rationing of water. There has been a drought for three years in this area of the Eastern Cape, and most of the major sources of water have been depleted, or are at very low levels. Channel 4 news  had a number of reports on the crisis, which in January had set the date of April for Day Zero to arrive. Thanks to a lot of efforts by residents to cut down on their water since then, and this has now been put back to later in the year, and possibly now into 2019 if current usage levels are maintained. There will be a focus on this story for my workshops in Geneva on Saturday. July was previousy the date when the water was predicted I will be sharing all the work from my workshop at the ECOLINT IB conference, which has been organised by Richard Allaway  here, during and after the event its

Iceland to remove all Palm Oil from products

The supermarket not the country... BREAKING NEWS: We're the UK's first supermarket to commit to removing #palmoil from our own label products by the end of this year! Watch here to find out why... #PalmOilAlarmCall pic.twitter.com/hfGvH2QRDW — Iceland Foods ❄️ (@IcelandFoods) April 10, 2018

Cunk on Britain

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Diane Morgan's creation has always been a favourite of mine, and I loved this programme . Laugh out loud and some excellent jokes on the creation and early pre-history, and great questions for the talking heads as well. She travels the breadth and width of the country... Keep an eye out for it on iPlayer, and also the next issue, which is shown tomorrow. On the Bayeux Tapestry:  “It’s just like being there, but in wool". NB: NSFW warning - a little sweary ...

GA Conference 2018 - here's 125 top tips for Geographers

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For the 125 days leading up to the conference, as part of the #125GA celebrations, there was a daily tweet offering a Top Tip for Geographers , with a tag #125geotips . These were on all sorts of geographical themes. Thanks to the tens of thousands of people who read them and responded to them over on Twitter, but for those who don't use Twitter, here's all 125 collated for you. The hyperlink will take you through to the original tweet with all the relevant images and links to the resources. 125 Top Tips for the Geographical Association’s 125th Anniversary Celebrations by GeoBlogs on Scribd