Tivy Education Medal

The Tivy medal is not awarded every year, and is awarded for outstanding contributions to Geography and education.
Previous winners that I could find were:

2008 - Jim Carson

2009 - Erica Caldwell

2010 - Anita Ganeri

2011 - Scottish Association of Geography Teachers

At the recent Scottish Association of Geography Teachers' Conference, Mike Robinson - the Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society read out a citation describing the person judged to have been worthy of being presented with the medal this year, and it turns out it was me!
It was presented by Professor Iain Stewart, who is the President of the Society.

Along with the medal, there was a very nice certificate of honorary fellowship.

What was equally important to me was to read and hear the comments of others who were there, who appreciated the work that I've created, and shared over the years....

Do you teach GCSE Geography - Edexcel 'A' specification ?

From SLN and Jon Wolton....

If you are an Edexcel GCSE Geography centre Pearson would very much like to involve you in the development of our new GCSE Geography specifications for first teaching September 2016 (at the time of writing).

If you are a current GCSE Geography specification A centre, we would like to hear your views, so please sign up for this event if you can - apologies for the short notice.

Don't worry if you are a GCSE Geography B specification centre - your chance will come!

When: 31 October 10.30-14.30

Where: 190 High Holborn, London

To reserve a place, email hilary.fine@pearson.com with your centre name and address, your name and position in school. Places are limited to 25 and early respondents will be prioritised.
Travel expenses will be paid and a £50 Amazon Voucher as reimbursement.

GCSE: time to take some risks ?

I'm unfortunately going to be unable to make this as planned, but if you're around next Thursday, the 17th of October, head over to Neale Wade Academy for the Teachmeet.
Now that I'm teaching, I feel qualified to contribute again :)

The focus is on risky pedagogies, and I have a session linked to our work on the Mission:Explore books and curriculum making... it does last about 20 minutes though ;)

Sign up HERE....

Freshly brewed resources, suitable for GCSE Geography

A few months ago, I worked on a short project for the COSTA FOUNDATION and RAINFOREST ALLIANCE, which involved creating a set of teaching resources around the theme of coffee production and the impact on those who are involved producing it. I'm grateful to those who helped me collect some of the information that made its way into the resource, which went live this week...
Check out the interactive map and teaching resources for download here.

Milk, no sugar....

My new book

Co-written with the great John Widdowson and now available to buy from the GA Shop....

Back to school...

Check my new TEACHING BLOG to find out more about my new teaching job and what I'm up to....

I'm off to a GCSE fieldtrip in a few weeks...
Will tell you all about it nearer the time...

It's good to be putting some of the ideas in the Badger book to practice... Get yourself a copy...

Intense but not in tents.... the Geography Camp

Over at the Geography Collective HQ, we’ve been making some changes and plotting some quality events. We are really pleased and excited to announce some of our plans for our residential camp in early 2014. This will focus on helping geography departments make sense of and subvert the current changes to the National Curriculum and examination system.

As well as the central theme, there will also be lots of informal activities, laughter, great food and fun. We are shaping the programme at the moment, but it will include stuff like:

• Fitting existing Schemes of Work and resources to the new National Curriculum; 
• Using young people to hack your existing curriculum; 
• What to do about assessment; 
• Using Key Stage 3 to improve GCSE performance. 

The final programme will be very much shaped by those who attend.

The style will be (un)conferency, with plenty of opportunity for informal chatting and sharing. As a school leader who held the CPD budget, we’re making it great value and will ensure you’ll leave with lots of ideas, contacts and resources.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ll be using the Field Studies Council centre at Juniper Hall. It’ll be full board and accommodation included in the price. The dates are Friday 25th to Sunday 26th of January 2014.

Go HERE to sign up and register your interest...

Follow and use the hashtag: #GCCamp

100 up...

Now over a year since the publication of my Badger book, and this is the 100th post on the blog to support the book.
Do you have a copy ?
What activities have you found the most useful ?
I'd love to know...

GA CPD Courses...

The details of the CPD courses being offered by the GA in the new academic year have been released, and are available for booking now.
Visit the website for details of all the courses.

I'm delighted to say that I will be leading the following days... at various venues around the country from the middle of November through to June 2014...
Hope to see some of you at one of these events...

For sale: one slightly used web domain

In 2001, I created a website called 'Mr. P's Geography Pages' which was hosted on the free TRIPOD service.
A few years later, I moved it to web hosts 123Connect and it became 'GeographyPages'.

At the time, other than David Rayner's GeoInteractive and David Robinson's site there were very few Geography-specific websites. This was in the days of Netscape Navigator and dial-up modems chirruping away...

The site had a few thousand visitors a year, but quickly grew to over a million visitors and well over that in terms of page views.
I had to double the bandwidth, and then again and again....
The website still gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a year,  although I 'archived' it in 2008 when I joined the Geographical Association.

If anyone is interested, the domain name is for sale.... one slightly shop-soiled URL

(Not that I anticipate anyone will be for a moment....)

The site will be disappearing shortly, so grab your favourite bits while you can.
The end of an era...
And the start of another in a month's time....