Showing posts with label GTAQ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GTAQ. Show all posts

Monday, July 30, 2012

Geographers coming together



Image: Brisbane from the air.

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Brisbane, Australia: S: 27º 29' E: 153º 08'

GTAQ Conference, July 28th, 2012 in Brisbane

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Geography Teachers Association of Queensland (GTAQ) Conference in Brisbane.   The GTAQ conference was a fantastic event thanks to the hard work of conference convenor Rebecca Nicholas and the GTAQ team.  Of special note was the increase in number at the conference.  Hopefully this is an indicator of change and a taste of things to come as the Australian Currciulum: Geography rolls out in 2013.  As always there were some links of interest from the conference - here are just some of them.

* Presentations on the Australian Curriculum: Geography and Geographical Thinking


These are my presentations on the Australian Curriculum: Geography and Geographical Thinking at the GTAQ Conference at the University of Queensland. Feel free to use these presentations as you talk to staff, colleagues, family, children, teachers, students etc about this exciting development for geography in Australian schools.

World Vision has a wonderful website with plenty of great school resources on global issues, aid and development.  
This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 10 Geographies of Human Well-being unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.


 The Destination Spatial initiative, managed by SSSI and SIBA, was created to establish a central repository of spatial resources and information for people outside the industry but interested in learning more about it as a career.


 Global thinking and global action demand global understanding. This initiative by the International Geographical Union aims to bridge the awareness gap between local acts and global effects. It will achieve this aim through research, education, and information.                      


 Following the UNISPACE III conference held in Vienna, Austria in July 1999, the European and French space agencies (ESA and CNES) initiated the International Charter "Space and Major Disasters", with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) signing the Charter on 20 October 2000.

The site contains a catelog contains no data but rather metadata describing the images acquired by a range of satellites during activations of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters.

The site also contains a real time page on the latest disasters aroung the world.

* Geographies of the Olympics

Views of the World is the blog of the personal research website of Benjamin D. Hennig based at the University of Sheffield. He has mapped this and other Olympics and has much much more on his blog related to personal and innovative geographies. Some fascinating visualisations and maps of many events and phenonmena - go to the archives to view these rich resources.



Friday, July 27, 2012

A gladbag of sites for the teaching of the Australian Curriculum: Geography


Image: Sunrise over Sydney.

Citing sites


Here is an array of some interesting sites (with no theme) that have come my way over the past month.  Again I have referenced/mapped to the Australian Curriculum Geography to show how so many sites can be used for the teaching of this new geography curriculum.





A site that has a graphic (visualisation of something) a day and an archive of past graphics. Great site for visual literacy.
This site would be useful to support the learning program for all years of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
The Livehoods Project presents a new methodology for studying the dynamics, structure, and character of a city on a large scale using social media and machine learning. Using data such as tweets and check-ins, we are able to discover the hidden structures of the city with machine learning. Our techniques reveal a snap-shot of the dynamic areas that comprise the city, which we call Livehoods. Livehoods allow us to investigate and explore how people actually use the city, simultaneosly shedding light onto the factors that come together to shape the urban landscape and the social texture of city life, including municipal borders, demographics, economic development, resources, geography, and planning. Livehoods is a research project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

This site would be useful to support the learning program in the Year 9 Interconnection unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
* Cool website
ClimaScope provides spatially explicit climate change data for 18 climate model patterns, for the new IPCC RCP scenarios, the old SRES scenarios, and specific adaptation scenarios for 2C, 3C and 4C warming.

This site would be useful to support the learning program in the Year 10 Environmental change and management unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
* The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) came from the concept of the balance between "Yin" and "Yang" of Tai chi in traditional Chinese wisdom.
The typhoon is a natural choice for the key feature in the logo of the HKO because members of the public always look towards the Observatory at times of typhoon. The cross at the centre symbolises the monitoring of typhoon rain bands by radar, representing round-the-clock surveillance of the weather by HKO and our target of making accurate weather forecasts. The typhoon symbol is extended laterally and fitted into an elliptic frame representing the shape of the Earth. It highlights the concept of stable equilibrium and prudency. It also alludes to geophysics and related sciences being part of the work of HKO.
Furthermore, two "S" symbols embedded in the HKO logo, a white "S" and a blue "S". They stand for "Science" and "Service" and stand for the fundamental philosophy of "Service based on Science".

This site would be useful to support the learning program for the Year 7 Water unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
Some polling data in which people were asked what factor shaped their acceptance of climate change. Buried in the data were two apparently contradictory findings: there is a large partisan divide in acceptance of climate change, but most respondents said they base their acceptance on their personal experience of the weather. Assuming that hot weather shows no partisan bias, this doesn't make much sense—political beliefs shouldn't influence what we think about the weather. And yet they do. That's the conclusion of a new paper that dives into extensive polling data to find out how people perceive different trends in the climate.
This site would be useful to support the learning program for the Year 10 Environmental change and management unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography

A food security index that ranks individual countries on food affordability, accessibility, availability, nutritional value and safety. An interactive site listing all the countries with supporting data.

This site would be useful to support the learning program for the Year 9 Biomes and Food Security and Year 10 Geogrpahies of Human Well-being units of the Australian Curriculum: Geography

This site would be useful to support the learning program for Years 5-10 of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
A beautiful video able awe and wonder of the world from the BBC.
This site would be useful to support the learning program for all years of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
Schools should place a renewed focus on traditional geography field trips to stop pupils being trapped behind computer screens in the classroom, Michael Palin has warned.

This site would be useful to support the learning program for all years of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
* Anthill below the ground

This site would be useful to support the learning program for all years of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
* Fact a day

This site would be useful to support the learning program for all years of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
Design reveals silhouettes of Earth's tectonic boundaries in stunning, luminous color
This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 8 Landscape and Landform unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
For London, it’s the city’s most visible stride towards promoting greater density. And a much needed one. Although firm data for the past decade is not yet available, spatial analysis for London shows a rise in density up until the 1950s, before things then started to retreat. This decline density persisted until 2001. The same analysis shows a forecast to 2030, which shows density continuing to decline. (Given the crush on the tube, presumably few locals have felt this effect.) But the question here is whether the Shard marks a reversal at all; it certainly would within the borough it’s located, but perhaps others will instead leave to make way for the new arrivals.

This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 9 Shaping a Nation unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 9 Shaping a Nation unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
This overview is the most accurate compilation of its kind and uses in-depth research results and reliable building information. It is based on data standards as outlined by the Emporis Standards committee (ESC). This listing is verified and updated continuously and includes high-rise buildings which have been topped out as well as those still under construction or on hold.

This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 9 Shaping a Nation unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
* Skyscaper index

This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 9 Shaping a Nation unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.
This site is a collection and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones—and has been writing the Strange Maps blog since 2006, first on WordPress and now for Big Think. An anthology of maps from this blog was published by Penguin in 2009.

This site would be useful to support the learning program for Year 5-10 of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.