A recent report on the impact of Digital Explorer’s two year programme to improve the use of technology in the geography classroom has resulted in 80% of teachers involved noting an improvement in pupil engagement and understanding.
This is fantastic news and shows the positive impact that technology can have. A full copy of the report can be downloaded.
This fourth entry in Digital Explorer’s Google Earth gallery is where it all started with a study of urban land use in Marrakech with pupils from Eastbury Comprehensive in 2006 on the Toubkal ’06 expedition.
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The use of Google Earth and remote blogging received an Innovative Geography Teaching Grant from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). |
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This work is also held up as a national case study by BECTA’s Next Generation Learning project. |
Download the Google Earth tour – Marrakech Land Use
You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:
Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.
The third entry in Digital Explorer’s Google Earth gallery features educational videos made during the E-Base Goes Live Expedition. More educational resources about Antarctica can be found at 2041′s Education Site.
Download the Google Earth tour – Antarctic Education Videos
You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:
Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.
This is the second entry in a series of expedition based Google Earth tours from Digital Explorer. We will be publishing a new tour everyday for the next couple of weeks. The E-Base video story Google Earth tour allows you to follow the E-Base Goes Live Expedition day-by-day with geo-located videos, as the team work to put up wind turbines in Antarctica.
Download the Google Earth tour – E-Base Video Story
You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:
Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.
This is the first tour in the Google Earth Expedition Gallery from Digital Explorer. Follow the team from Digital Explorer, npower and 2041, as they find about life in Antarctica during their time on King George Island on the E-Base Goes Live Expedition in March 2009.
Download the Google Earth tour – Living in Antarctica
You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:
Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.
Geographical Magazine is putting together a short feature in which experienced expeditioners offer tips to those planning their first expedition in the October issue, as a run-up to the annual Explore Conference at the Royal Geographical Society.
Mine are…
What is your top tip for those planning an expedition?
Integrate your communications and education plans from the outset. You have the ability to inspire a huge range of people to make a difference.
What item do you always take with you on an expedition?
Satellite communications kit. It’s a real joy to be able to share an expedition in real-time with an audience back home.
Get the October issue or come along to Explore to find out more.
Also see the January article on Digital Explorer.
There has been a lot in the press recently about the campaign for the reactivation of the Society’s multidisciplinary research projects to greatly advance geographical science and knowledge (for more information see the Beagle Campaign’s website). The campaign has come about because the Society is perceived to be overly focused on funding other people’s research and is not taking a lead in putting its own multi-disciplinary teams in the field to reveal much needed information about our ever changing world.
So how do these two approaches fit with the exploration philosophy held by Digital Explorer. We believe that exploration, expeditions, field projects – call it what you will – should have four main steps.
Explore and go out into the world to seek new information and knowledge that is critical to advance our understanding of the world and how best humankind can enjoy and conserve the planet and its diverse peoples, species and environments.
Discover through the proper application of research methods as well as incorporating the wealth of indigenous knowledge into our understanding. Exploration is not just about travel, but a journey or field-based project with real rigour.
Share your findings with others and more widely than a narrowly read tome, gathering dust somewhere. There are so many engaging and inspiring ways of doing this. A minimum target for any expedition should be to reach 1,000 people who you didn’t know before you left.
Engage others to act. Knowledge is all very well and good, but no amount of knowledge and research alone will encourage the wider public to change behaviours and attitudes, needed for sustainable future. Without engagement we will all be better informed, and yet still unmoved.
There are expeditions that do fulfil these criteria, operating outside the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society. Expeditions that fulfil not just a need for good field science, but also seek to stir emotions and inspire change. The Society is the only British institution in a position to coordinate truly inspiring scientific journeys and projects, that have at their core a desire to find out more about our planet, and to share these discoveries through powerful stories that speak to people on a emotional level.
If facts and figures could save the world, there wouldn’t be a need to have this conversation.
The rise and rise of Twitter (a micro-blogging tool) has brought into sharp focus a division or shift in the social networking or web 2.0 landscape.
If web 2.0 can be categorised as online conversation, whether that be through the written word, images, video or a mix of the three, do we join these conversations based on who they’re with or what they’re about?
Contacts or content?
The difference is most notable when comparing a service such as Facebook and something like Twitter. Facebook replicates real world friendship and contact groups, whether professional or personal. Although some people gather ‘friends’ as those they’re life depended on it, the convention seems to be that I need to know you before I allow you to be my ‘friend’.
Conversely with Twitter, the friendship aspect is taken away. I can become a ‘follower’ of someone’s Twitter feed (the list of short comments or ‘tweets’ that are made and posted online). Becoming a follower of their feed does not make me their friend. It means that what they are saying is interesting and I would like to know what they have to say. It may be that I know this person in the real world and know that they are interesting, but there is much more opportunity to take the ‘contact’ aspect out of Twitter and keep your relations based on your interest in the conversation.
Image: http://www.wordle.net
This is a wordle based on a the Middle East news feed from the BBC. Fair or not?
There is a discussion page available for pupils.
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