Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The power of the blog













Left Image: Canberra, symmetrical urban planning.
Right image:Coming into Canberra.

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'


The blog is being used very powerfully to distribute and discuss the plethora of sites available for teachers to use. Where does one start? I suggest the blog titled ‘Free technology for teachers’ as a great place to start. The blog has been created by Richard Byrne, a full time Social Studies teacher, Google Certified teacher in the US. Over 30 000 subscribe to his blog.
Go to the archives for this blog and you will see an almost overwhelming wealth of sites to use for the classroom. Many of these are related to spatial technology.
Here are just some of the great spatial education ideas from Richards’s postings:
* Geography action free downloads
* US voting on Google. The Google Earth team has mapped historical election results in Google Earth and Google Maps.
* Interactive exploration map
* The world in virtual reality
* Travel IQ? The web's original travel blog
* On-line maps
* National Atlas map maker. Using a GIS viewer to build maps of the US.
* Thematic mapping engine enables you to visualise global data on Google Earth.
*Graphing books? The Books Ngram Viewer provides users with a tool for graphing when and how frequently phrases, names, and words have appeared in the books archived by Google Books.
* Similar site search engine
* Geospace
There are thousands more sites on the blog. Happy viewing.


Following on from my last posting here are some more visualisations. Not surprisingly many of the listed below are also blogs. Vizualizing.org is a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design… and it’s a shared space and free resource to help you achieve this goal. By some estimates, we now create more data each year than in the entirety of prior human history. Data visualization helps us approach, interpret, and extract knowledge from this information. Visualising is a place to exhibit the collective work of your students, organize assignments and class projects, and help your students find data for their own visualisations


Here are some interesting geographical visualisations:
Visualisation of Wireless technology and urban spaces
* Traffic impact
* Treemap of billion dollar amounts.
* Population diversity
* Footprint v’s biodiversity
* GIS mapping technology is helping underprivileged communities get better services — from education and transportation to health care and law enforcement — by showing exactly what discrimination looks like
* Grapes! Recently the Western Cape Department of Agriculture started a new project focusing on operationally monitoring efficient crop water and nitrogen use of grapes in the Western Cape. The objective of the project is to assist grape farmers with the daily management of irrigation water resources and on-farm nitrogen by means of satellite remote sensing technologies.

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