Is Geography teaching rubbish?

There has been a lot of stuff on the news this week about the low standards of Geography teaching in England and Wales. In a report by the BBC they claim that Geography must be made more relevant. I suppose I find it hard to believe that it isnt! Everything we teach is part of the world - part of the bigger picture - part of the macro ecosystem of the world that we live in. I cannot think of any more relevant subject - global warming, debt, poverty, migration, aids - these are the issues that make up the news and these are the things of geography. Maybe teachers need to refresh their case studies a bit and maybe we need to protect the specialism that is geography rather than let it be diluted into 'popular science'. Our job is to teach how the world works. Do we do it? The President of the RGS (Royal Geographical Society) - Dr Rita Gardner replied that
"Young people have a tremendous curiosity about the world, and there are few subjects more relevant than geography. Indeed, it remains one of the most popular subjects at GCSE. Through forthcoming curriculum changes and enhanced professional development opportunities and resources, I am convinced that geography will become sufficiently interesting and engaging for that curiosity to be stimulated for all our children.”

Feb 2008

The Impact of Natural Disasters

I live in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is not afflicted by huge measures of natural disaster. We dont get volcanoes. We dont get earthquakes. We dont get huge amounts of rainfall or drought. We dont get huge tropical cyclones parking off the coast and controlling our weather for weeks on end. I suppose we are pretty lucky. Over the last few days we have seen some pictures of the impact that a cyclone has had on Burma. To date about 22,000 are deads with another 40,000 lost. If this happened in NI what would our response be? It would be on every channel 24/7. We would know everything about the loss of life and the impact on people. Yet again, I feel that we are selling this crisis short. We need to see the problem. We need to see how we can help and we need to see how we can help countries like this make sure that something like this is minimised iun the future. Maybe it just that our countries have been navel-gazing recently - worrying about the global credit crunch and house prices falling that we are more worried about the state of our finances compared to the survival of others. Let me finish with one fact.
Average annual wage of a subsistence rice farmer in Burma (of which around 17,000 are now dead) = $150
Average amount of money spent by students in my school on school dinners in a year = $1000 (£500)
Do the maths!
7th May 2008

Its been a while . . . . .

Well, it has been a bit of time since I have updated this site. I have been putting some blog entries onto my own site but I think I am going to maybe come back to this again. Think it might be easier to manage in the long term to have all my blog stuff in the one place. So - I am going to look at my site archive and put some of my old comments on here over the next few hours. Enjoy!

Multiple personality disorder

I dont know about you but I am starting to suffer some form of sczhio-related illness. Today I joined another online community and got yet another email address to use. I think that at present I have about 7 email addresses that I actually use and it is becoming more and more difficult to keep track of them all. I use them all for different things and different purposes. I really need to think about consolidating them but some I have had for so long, others attach to my website, one is for work only, one is for my mac, one is for my IM client etc . . . it mounts up . . . . is there any way to get round all of this?

I apologise for not putting an online entry down for some time but I have been very busy lately and not really had the time to put stuff up here - I hope ypu dont mind but I do hope to put some more regular blog entries through this year - though I am currently working on developing my own blog page which I might talk about in another post soon!

Happy new year!

Exploratree

Got an invitation today to try out their new exploratree website. . . . . . they write . . . .

Exploratree website

You're invited to an early preview of our new, free web resource which can be used for downloading, using and making interactive thinking guides. Thinking guides can be useful for supporting independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry. The website is currently in beta version for testing and we'd really welcome your feedback. Go to Exploratree website...

MORE cool websites!

You know this blog could very quickly become a repository for cool websites that I come across that I want to be able to use at home and in school! I really hope not. I cam across a few quite cool sites today that I am going to try and use in some shape or form over the next while with some of my classes.

Bubbl.us is a site where you can do some online brainstorming and mindmapping

Community walk is an interesting mapping application that allows people to plot journeys . . . I a thinking of trying to develop a journey to school type thing . . . .

Weebly is a rather nice and easy to use web design and web authiring online programme - its really good for beginners who want to set up their very own site . . . .

I came across this cool site application!

Star in Your Own JibJab! It's Free!I came across this rather cool site the other day and made a little video - with many apologies to my good friend - who I hope does not mind, too much!