GA – A different view

The movie to accompany ‘a different view’ the Geographical Association’s 2009 ‘Manifesto’ for school geography. Geography is about discovering the world… and its complexity Geography deepens our understanding of the world Geography fascinates and inspires Thinking geographically … thinking critically … about what we see and understand This can be shown without any preamble as to its purpose as hopefully the movie makes it clear what it is for.

I’ve spent a bit of time reading over ‘A Different View’ page on the GA website and am initially impressed, as I often am by the way in which the GA aims to drive forward and support school geography.

An aspect of the site that initially grabbed my interest were the results from the Ipsos MORI survey of key stage 3 pupils on world issues. I found the results quite enlightening, if not suprising. What makes me think now, is how can we as geography educators tackle pupils concerns, particularly over crime and anti-social behaviour? There seem to be clear opportunities to integrate these finding alongside the every child matters and community cohesion agenda.

Some food for though in terms of curriculum planning. Could there be some mileage in a cross-curricular project centred around pupils perceptions of crime and anti-social behaviour?

Urban Fieldwork using Trailguru

I’ve neglected this blog for quite a while now, so with a break from the day-to-day demands of teaching I thought it was about time to post.

Today I’ve been out with my Year 12 Geography students completing some urban fieldwork in relation to Unit 2 of the AQA AS Geography exam that they will sit in the summer. We were aiming to compare environment and housing quality in two contrasting inner city areas (Everton and Princes Park) and a suburban area (Woolton) in Liverpool. We decided to compare two inner city wards due to the results of the data that we collected from the census 2001 website. The results threw up some interesting discoveries in terms of ethnicity, employment and education when comparing the two wards.

During the day students were required to complete environmental and housing quality surveys within the three wards. Whilst completing these surveys, I thought today would be a good idea to track our journey using the Trailguru application for my iPhone. I hoped to track our whole journey, plus collect geotagged photographs that would hopefully show how housing changed as we moved away from the CBD of Liverpool. Kenny O’Donnell had completed a similar activity recently using Everytrail, and after the results from today I may go back across our route and use Everytrail as today’s results were not as good as I had hoped.

You can view my trail of the Trailguru website, and some of the results are quite interesting and useful, but unfortunately only parts of my trail have been saved and only seven of the photographs that I took have been uploaded to the site. Whether this is a problem with the site or an issue with me using my phone I’m not too sure?

The image to the left indicates my trail from today. The majority of the trail has been picked up and the first seven photographs that I took are accurately geotagged. Unfortunately the trail did seem to be cut off when travelling from Princes Park to Woolton. In addition to this, all of the photographs that I took in Princes Park and Woolton have not been posted to the site.

The trails can also be viewed in Google Earth and this can be viewed below.

The elevation profile indicates how land height changes across my trail. This clearly shows as we moved away from the CBD of Liverpool, our elevation increases. Exactly what we expected.

The potential for this software is clearly there to see. Hopefully over this week I will re-visit the three wards that we visited today and upload a new trail with geotagged photographs to support the data that we collected.