Friday 2 December 2022

Census 2021: How well do you know your area?

 

These quizzes were previously available for the 2011 Census, and are now back with data from the 2021 Census.

The quizzes can be embedded, which makes them particularly useful for teachers who can add them to VLE pages etc.


Saturday 20 August 2022

WJEC Blended Learning Resources

There is a wealth of Blended Learning resources on the WJEC / CBAC website.

These are excellent and cover a great many topics suitable for 'A' level and GCSE students and also teachers who want to check their subject knowledge ahead of teaching a topic for the first time. They are free, and no account is needed. They follow a similar format to those on the SENECA website.

Click BEGIN and work through the resources.

Very helpful support from the awarding body.

Saturday 4 June 2022

GeogPod: National Fieldwork Week

Head out with Year 10 this coming week if you can.

One of the best ways to appreciate the landscape is to head out on fieldwork. 

The latest GeogPod has been released and it features Paula Richardson and I talking about the GA's National Research Report and how that fed into the development of the National Fieldwork Week.

 This starts on Monday the 6th of June.



Thanks to John Lyon for hosting - see if you can spot the question I wasn't expecting... :) 

Wednesday 23 March 2022

AQA Pre-release 2022

I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.


The scheme was controversial, although the benefits were clearly stated by the company. A protest group was set up, and commissioned a report on the impact of the proposal, which included mention of the chimney which would be taller than Ely Cathedral and spoil the view towards it from Madingley (a place of geographical significance).

Interestingly, for a pre-release where students usually have to weigh up whether a planned development should go ahead, the decision has already been made in that the scheme was .... spoiler alert.... turned down in 2020.


I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.

Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.

An editable version is below or on this link...


Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.

Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license

Thursday 3 March 2022

Threads

This is not related to the 1980s TV drama featuring a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield...

Threads is a new online game from the Global Goals Centre, which has had the involvement of a number of organisations.

Thanks to Verity Jones for the tipoff.

Go here to play the game.

The activity explores the product life cycle of an item of clothing, with different routes depending on what the product is, and several other decisions that are taken during the course of the journey... This is revealed at the end.


Usefully, the team has also created a set of lesson plans which are helpful for those in KS2 and KS3, and with a strong cross-curricular / Global Goals theme. There are 8 lessons, each with a PPT and an accompanying overview document.

Here are the details of the team that created the game and accompanying resources.


This is well worth taking a look at, as there might be something here that can slot nicely into, or alongside existing curriculum content and activities.