Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Where am I??
Making it easy to find teaching materials
The way forward for the
curating and sharing of geographical sites is through websites such as Scoop.it
(http://www.scoop.it/) and the communication network of Twitter. As an educator one should join
and share – you will be amazed by the number of fantastic resources and sites
regularly turning up in your email inbox.
It makes life easier in preparing and researching for material to use in
the classroom.
Scoop.it is a wonderful website with
the potential to link into a wide range of geography orientated websites
collected by individuals. It is also a great resource for teachers to curate
collections of geographical materials found on the Internet.
Learn about Scoop.it and Try using Scoop.it at http://www.scoop.it/
and Scoop it on Twitter
at http://twitter.com/scoopit.
Here is a great
example of an educator (Seth
Dixon is a
professor at Rhode
Island College
and can be reached via Twitter @APHumanGeog) using Scoop.it to curate and
spread outstanding geographical education sites and resources. The site is
called Geographical Education and is at http://www.scoop.it/t/geography-education
“Global news with a spatial perspective: resources
for educators and the inherently inquisitive.
Here is just a selection of Seth’s
communication network in one week.
* Twitter:
http://twitter.com/APHumanGeog
* Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/geographyeducation
* Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/geogeducation/
* SITES
WITH THE CONTENT UPDATES:
* Wordpress:
http://geographyeducation.org
* Scoop.it:
http://www.scoop.it/t/geography-education
* Tumblr:
http://geographyeducation.tumblr.com
Here are some great cites ‘provided on a plate’
via Seth’s networks.
This database of global wars and conflicts is
searchable through space and time. You can drag and click the both the
map and timeline to locate particular battles and wars, and then read more
information about that conflict. This resource would be a great one to
show students and let them explore to find what they see as interesting.
This site is brimming with potential.
The artistic collection entitled 'Landscapes'
compiled "the bizarre instances of cartographic dissonance inflicted
by the Dutch government over their virtual lands. As Henner notes, the number
of censored sites within the small country of the Netherlands is surprising, as
is the technique used by officials to disguise them. Tracts of land deemed
vulnerable to attack or misappropriation are transformed into large tapestries
of multi-colored polygons, archipelagos of abstraction floating in swaths of
open fields, dense forests, and clusters of urban development."
This is an excellent review/summary of an edited
volume that shows the value of geographic thought and its importance in the
modern world. This review conveniently gives a one paragraph synopsis of
each chapter. It does not need to be read chronologically, so you can
pick and choose what you find relevant to your course. The top 10 are (in
order of inclusion in the book): the Idea of the Map, the Weather Map, GIS,
Human Adjustment, Water Budget Climatology, Human Transformation of the Earth,
Spatial Organization and Interdependence, Central Place Theory, Megalopolis and
Sense of Place.
This
site shows how much space would be needed if the world’s population lived
uniformly at the density of selected countries. It’s a good comparative use of
spatial data. Here’s the original link:
This new resource, myHistro, combines interactive
maps with timelines to organize stories, journeys or historical events as the
move over time and place. By embedding photos, videos and links this
creates an incredibly dynamic platform for telling historical and geographic
stories. By combining these features, this is a powerful tool to create
customized resources for you students. Pictured above is a sample
timeline that shows the spatial and temporal journey of the Olympic torch for
the 2012 Games.
There are plenty of regional biases about other
places. This map was generated by Google autocomplete. If you
Google, "Why is Rhode Island so...." if will automatically suggest
some responses. This was done for all the states and these autoresponses
are quite revealing (and often humorous).
Using
satellite images to see change http://blog.americaview.org/search/label/Landsat
"With the help of satellite images fifth and
sixth grade students at Mr. Tim Blum’s geography class at the University of
Wyoming Lab School got a birds-eye view of how humans have impacted or modified
their environments. Images acquired by satellites decades apart showed cleared
forests, irrigated crop fields in the middle of the deserts, altered landscapes
(new roads and water bodies), and urban growth."
In short, there is so much great teaching
materials and hints up on the Internet now, programs such as Scoop.it and
Twitter just help us find and curate what is good. In fact it comes to us on a
daily basis instead of wasting time searching!!
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