David Rogers

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 ...

This post reminded me of a documentary series a while back. Combined with Dan's work , Noel's ideas and a ' travel guide ' I'm thinking of putting together a mini unit based on places that don't exist. I'm hoping that the main outcome will be the creation of more places that don't exist. For example: how many of the places and spaces that young people inhabit and interact with don't exist for us? How many spaces don't exist for pupils? The staff room? The Head's Office? The dining table? This unit could really explore personal geographies. Based on some neogeography could we make maps of places that don't exist in our local city? If we layered different people's maps where would be the overlaps? What would happen if we expanded the map to include a county, region, country..... Could we compare the maps of different nationalities, ethnic background, age, social class...... This could well be a can'o'worms.....

A thought provoking post by Noel has made me think. Is one way to close the gap between secondary and tertiary education to use the terminology of higher institutions? A simple change could have a large impact....