Geography Education

"I just returned a few days ago from a great week in Cincinnati, reading AP Human Geography exams with 400 colleagues from all over the country. In our conversations during the reading, I've come across a number of these folks, many of them high school teachers, who are interested in using Twitter but have no idea where to start.

What I'm hoping to do in the next few entries is give a beginner's guide to using Twitter, specifically geared toward folk who are completely lost at how to begin. I'll also be working toward some 'best practices' once the basics are out of the way." 

See this 'ultimate Twitter Guide'-- http://blog.grabinbox.com/2012/04/24/the-ultimate-twitter-guide/

Need a few ideas of who to follow?  Try these: https://twitter.com/#!/APHumanGeog/geog-400-ideas/members

If you are unconvinced that you should get on twitter (#aphg), see: http://www.creativeeducation.co.uk/blog/index.php/2011/09/10-reasons-to-tweet/

Amber Hill EDU10713 Curriculum, Assessment & New Media Emerging Pedagogies...

This student-produced video (from Southern Cross University in Australia) has many good insights...especially the tagline "we need to prepare our students for the future, not the past." While all new technologies do not improve on tried and true practices, some are worth putting into our classes as the resources become available to us. Also this video outlines numerous resources and how they can be used in the classroom. Who says we can't learn from students?

Amazing things about Google Earth - news, features, tips, technology, and applications...

This blog post will link you to numerous educational uses for Google Earth, including "GIS-like" overlays.  This is a great resource that can be adapted for various grade levels. 

This is a video introduction to www.historypin.com which might just prove to be a very useful and important project.  It's historical geography powered by collaborative mapping that is infused with social media dynamics.  Backed by Google, they are geo-tagging old photos to recreate the historical geographies of all places and comparing them with current street view images.  You can search by topic, place or date...this has the potential to be very big.   

An excellent AP Human Geography course page with many solid resources.  The bulk of the resources (activities, graphic organizers, articles, etc.) is within the "unit files" and therefore thematically arranged.  Thanks for sharing your resources; you make Windsor High School proud!    

There are two aims to the game. One is to collect points and unlock rewards. The other is to experience the world in new ways by doing vitally important random and warped challenges.

 The more missions you do the more rewards you'll unlock and the more fun you'll have during your stay on planet Earth.  The missions on this website have been created by different challengers. Some make winning their rewards harder than others.

This provies the basic overview of the layout and function of http://geteach.com .  The video unlocks some great features that are not intended to be hidden, but many first time visitors tend to miss.

This is a phenomenal site, designed by an AP teacher to bring geospatial technologies into the classroom in a way that is incredibly user-friendly. This site allows you to use Google Earth with clickable layers. With multiple data layers of physical and human geography variables, this interactive globe puts spatial information in powerful, yet fun, student-inspired platform.

"The World Bank eAtlas of Global Development maps and graphs more than 175 thematically organized indicators for over 200 countries, letting you visualize and compare progress on the most important development challenges facing our world. Most indicators cover several decades, so you can see, for example, how 'life expectancy at birth' has improved from 1960 up through the latest year."  This tool should greatly enhance student projects as they will add more data, and see bigger patterns.  To go to the link visit: http://www.app.collinsindicate.com/worldbankatlas-global/en

Worth exploring...this isn't just a single random link.  Geocube is a portal to numerous topics, regions and themes.  

Having been voted by the American Association of School Librarians as one of the "Top 25 websites for Teaching and Learning," Geocube comes highly recommended, and rightfully so (see: http://www.ala.org/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/bestlist/bestwebsitestop25?mid=53 ).  This is a must-see. 

"In the United States, roughly half of today’s classrooms have an interactive whiteboard. As the leading producer of maps and globes for schools, Herff Jones-Nystrom saw in this an opportunity to deliver geography, history and other social studies content to educators and their students in a new and innovative way. StrataLogica® is their revolutionary web-based product that delivers layers of age-appropriate, curriculum-based content for use in the classroom, library or home."

Best of History Web Sites, created by EdTechTeacher, is an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1200 history web sites and activities.

Knowing that many geography teachers also teach social studies and history, I thought I'd share this as well (plus in the "lesson plans" tab there are geography links as well).