Badger book heading down to the SW

I shall be packing a copy of my Badger GCSE book at the weekend and heading down to the SW to lead a day for subject leaders down in Cornwall.
The event will take place at the venue shown in the picture here...

Part of the session will be on Ds to Cs....

Some of the materials will be shared on Slideshare after the event...
It's a long way !

digitalearth CPD - better GCSE and other things...

For the last year or two I've been running courses at the University of Salzburg.
They are five day courses in the use of digitalearth technology.

The funding pays for the course fee and travel as well as expenses for things like food.

This is a great opportunity to explore the wonderful city of Salzburg and surrounding area, as well as meet with delegates from all over Europe and swap ideas. Two of the UK delegates from a course that was run at the start of the year have since gained promotions within their department too. No guarantees that attending will do the same for you, but you never know :)

Get more information and download the details you need to start the application process here.

Course will run in January and March 2014

Panorama from Salzburg fortress: Alan Parkinson

Interview lesson resources

For my new teaching job I had to teach a lesson on the theme of Wind Farm Development.

Fortunately, the department has been using my GA KS3 toolkit 'Look at it this Way'
This book is still available to buy from the GA Shop.

I decided in the time that I had to prepare for my interview lesson, which was very short and ended up being in the early hours of the morning of the day itself, that I would adapt a lesson from the book. Some of the students had apparently been doing some of the activities already, so had a flavour of what to expect.
Here's an image of a wind farm that I took while on my way between home and Sheffield.
I discovered that in terms of the definition of a wind farm, then as few as two wind turbines could be classed as a wind farm for planning purposes, although some local authorities classed it as three. There was no overall definition in terms of numbers.

Wind Farm, Lincolnshire Fens, as seen from the A17
Image by Alan Parkinson

As I had a bit of advance notice of the lesson topic, I was able to ask some of my friends to tell me some words to describe wind turbines, and I was able to create a word cloud.
Word cloud created using Wordle.net

Thanks to those people who helped with the lesson in this way.

And here is the lesson itself.

I uploaded it to Slideshare...

Wind lesson from GeoBlogs

And here's the lesson plan....

Note that this is an interview lesson, so is not necessarily representative of normal practice...
I over-prepared and adapted some of the activities (of which there were too many)

Wind Farms lesson plan from GeoBlogs

Some news and some thanks

Over at my Living Geography blog...

6 mark questions...

Relevant to the iGCSE too, but this is a nice piece of work on answering longer questions by Charlotte Lemaitre.