Jun

29th 2008

Geography Girl

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Here’s a flashback moment (at least for me) to grade school geography.

Visit the image on Flickr, read the fun posts and help out Skye by adding a note on where you live.

Jun

21st 2008

Happy Geography

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Joy over on the Happy to be at Home has posted some useful links to sites that help kids and adults learn more about geography.

May

04th 2008

Internet for Geography

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Internet for Geography is a guide to finding geography learning sites on the Internet created by librarians John Blunden-Ellis and Pete Maggs.  The site is broken into different sections to educate the user about some of the best geography related sites.  The site is somewhat biased towards United Kingdom sites but still presents a well rounded list of sites for the avid geographer.

Feb

27th 2008

Geography Songs

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Learning through singing has been used as an effective tool.  The Songs for Teaching site has a lite of recommended songs for learning about geography.  The songs listed on this page link to lyrics for each of the pages with the option to either purchase the song via download or CD. 

Yakko Warner, who looks vaguely like Mickey Mouse, sings about the countries of the world in this animated clip from YouTube. 

Feb

18th 2008

How Do Shanty Towns Develop?

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This educational animation created by the Staffordshire Learning Network (SLN) shows the four stages of shanty town development.  Shanty towns, also referred to as barrios, favelas, and squatter settlements, form when immigrants to a city without access to fixed housing, develop their own impoverished communities.  The animation takes the user through the different stages with clickable areas to learn more about the different aspect of how these impromptu developments come about.

Visit: Shanty Town 

Dec

17th 2007

Can Posh and Becks Make Geography Interesting?

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The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in the United Kingdom certainly thinks so.  Charged with developing the National Curriculum, the governing body is urging teachers of grade level students to “use music, films and soaps as an accessible, contemporary and different source of geographical information.”  Examples provided on the web site to make geography lessons more appealing is the use of David and Victoria Beckham’s family to understand socioeconomic decisions, watching mob movies to understand the geographic differences between north and south Italy, and Disney movies to understand biodiversity.  The suggestions have been heavily criticised by many as patronizing and representing a dumbing down of geography.  Chris Woodhead, Ofsted’s former chief inspector of schools, accused the QCA of “dumbing down” the “intelligence, challenge and excitement” of geography.  Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, added: “What would excite young people is gaining a growing interest in the world. They can’t do this when they’re being patronised and talked down to.”

Read more:

Dec

10th 2007

How Well Do You Know Your World?

Filed Under Education, Games | 1 Comment

A fun way to learn about where places are in the world is to take advantage of the plethora of free geography games on the Internet.  One such game is “How Well Do You Know Your World?”  The object of the game is to accurately locate places on the world map as quickly as possible.  The game starts out easy with major world cities and then progressively becomes harder.  When you click on the map, the distance from your mouse click to the actual location is calculated.  Interesting trivia about the location accompanies each question. 

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