Using PowerPoint better: LiveWeb add-in plus text input to support thinking about UK flooding

Geography is all about events that happen outside in the real world. As mentioned last week, Year 10 are currently exploring flooding and its effects. That means a slight juggle in the order of teaching in order to utilise the resources as they happen. I’m sure our young people can live without oxbow lakes for a few lessons Winking smile .

What enables Priory Geography to develop these ideas is the following (although Jo and Sam may disagree)

A solid curriculum, supported by lesson level Schemes of Work. We are always aware of the bigger picture and the requirements of the examination. This allows us to link current events easily to the specification, ensuring that we are developing geographers rather than exam passers.
A sharing culture within the department and the wider geography world – this enables us to collaborate on ideas and develop them. The learning activity described below was inspired by Sam’s input earlier today: he emailed out some resources and weblinks.

I’ve created a short screencast that demonstrates the learning idea. Apologies for the poor sound quality and random rambling, but I hope you get the idea!

Thanks to Stuart Ball at Microsoft’s Partners in Learning for first alerting me to these features through the Teacher Blog. Both of the tools are easy to use for proficient PowerPoint users:

The lesson goes on to explore the UK floods via a geographical enquiry (supplied by Sam Atkins) and uses a live Twitter feed to add further information. Getting young people to critically assess formal and informal sources of information is an important geographical and life skill (and with the BBC and other news channels using sources such as YouTube and Twitter more often this is even more important.)

The resources used are:

Flickr Environment Agency Slideshow (thanks Sam)
Twitter Live Results Search ‘Floods’. Deliberately vague search term to start discussion.

Comments

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