Google Earth, Neogeography and Travel Books

A good return to work today. Hit Year7 with the new Stonehenge lesson based on Noel's work on the RGS site. Thought I;d combine a number if ideas including talking about neogeography (Noel) and a few tips picked up during Ollie's SAGT session.

Stonehenge – Seventh Wonder Or National Disgrace

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

The PPT above accompanies the lesson and is also available on the department blog. The lesson sequence went something like:

Pupils used an OS map extract of Stonehenge to write down 3 features about the location. Map skills have been done away with by my department - and it was interesting to see that most of the class were able to interpret the map, without a key. I'm very glad that we have decided not to teach a 'Map Skills' unit this year!!
The learning objectives were shared using the Smoke Signal API.
Pupils then used the Photos and Wikipedia layers in Google Maps. As GE isn't up and running on the network yet this was a great way to explore the area. Pupils also explored the terrain function. A discussion then followed 'What was the best way to find out information about Stonehenge?' This worked really well as none of the pupils taught today had ever been there - most hadn't even known that Stonehenge existed! I used the word neogeography and pupils seemed to be comfortable with this. I also used a number of personal examples of where I have used these applications in planning expeditions - pupils then thought about what they could use them for.
I then read three extracts from travel guides. Pupils had to imagine what they would see at Stonehenge based on the information so far.
After showing the photos from Noel's Flickr account we had a fun 5 minutes talking about reactions.
The main task was to produce a comic strip of a visit to Stonehenge.

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