Daily Geography Week 2

Daily Geography Week 1

7 Solid Resources for Geography Awareness Week

7 Solid Resources for Geography Awareness Week

Free Technology for Teachers

This week is Geography Awareness Week. On Saturday I shared a great resource for a geography lesson on interdependence. That lesson is called the Global Closet Calculator and it was developed by National Geographic. Here are seven other good resources that you can use in geography lessons this week or any week.

Stack the Countries is a fun geography app available for the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPad Touch. The game requires players to correctly answer a geography question in order to earn a game piece that they then place into a row. The object is to stack up pieces to reach a target height. When the target height is reached players move on to the next level.


Uncharted.fm offers a series of progressively more difficult geography lessons and quizzes. In the beginning you're limited to one region and or continent at a time. As you master each region or continent you earn badges and unlock new challenges. I really like the manner in which Uncharted.fm presents the lessons. In each lesson you're shown a country, the country's name is read to you, then you practice identifying it in two ways. You identify countries by choosing the name of the country that is highlighted for you. You also identify countries by selecting the one of the three highlighted that match the name you're given.

Overlap Maps is a free service that can be used to quickly compare the size of countries, states, provinces, and some bodies of water. To create a visual comparison of two countries select one country from the "overlap this" menu and select one country from the "onto this" menu. The comparisons you make are displayed on a map. You can make comparisons from different categories. For example, you can overlap Lake Erie onto New Hampshire. 

To help your students prepare for next year's National Geographic Bee, National Geographic offers the GeoBee Challenge. The GeoBee Challenge is a daily series of ten geography quiz questions. The challenges can be played in apprentice mode or in expert mode. Apprentice mode gives students two tries at every question. The expert mode gives just one shot at each question.

Harnu is an interesting whose is to enable you to discover news, videos, music and connect with people all over the world. To discover news, videos, and music sign-in to Harnu, select a media type, then select a country. Harnu will then give you a list of news stories, videos, or music from your chosen country. To connect with people all over the world sign-in to Harnu, select "send message," select the location to which you want to send a message, then write and send your message. People from that location can see you message and reply to you. And you can use Harnu to select location, find people sending messages from those countries then reply to them.

Place Spotting is a website of geographic riddles. Place Spotting is based on the Google Earth platform. Place Spotting users can create their own geographic riddles or try to solve riddles created by others. The search feature on Place Spotting lets users search for riddles based on level of difficulty, language, region, or creation date.

Geosense is a fun way to use and improve your knowledge of world geography. Players can play against the computer or challenge another player. Geosense can be played anonymously or you can register and have your scores recorded for you. There are four Geosense maps (US, World, Europe, or advanced) that players can select from. Geosense is also available as an iOS app.

Bonus Item! 21 Map Creation Tools for Teachers and Students

This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers .

Men at Lunch: The Story of the Irish in New York City

Men at Lunch 
Director Seán Ó Cualáín, an accomplished documentary director for both TG4 and RTÉ in Ireland, comes to DOC NYC for the US premiere of his newest work, Men at Lunch. The film tells the story of the iconic 1932 photo of workmen sitting on a girder at the 69th floor of Rockefeller Center, calmly having their lunch. He uses the photo to explore the larger story of the immigrant (and often Irish) workers who built New York.

Weekly assignments for November 5-9

Current event 10 number 10 due on Friday. The topic is anything happening in Africa, Asia,Europe, South America, or Australia.

Weekly assignments for October 29th 2012

Week of October 24

Inside view of the Google data centers

Google recently produced some excellent web content about their Data centers, especially an inside look at the one in Lenoir.

I wanted to share it with you and possibly you can find a way to discuss it in your classes. It also shows images of employees.

Images:

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avP5d16wEp0&feature

Street View Walk through:

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/

Geography Bee and Chess Club Meetings

 

2012-13 Geography Bee Meetings and Chess Club Meetings.

All meetings are from 2.30-3.30

Geography Bee

Nov 8

Dec 13

Jan 17

Chess Club

Feb 14

March 14

April 18

The Choice 2012: Frontline

Watch The Choice 2012 on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Fostering Tech Skills is School

Very interesting article describing how employeers need students with Computer Science degrees.

Letter Home with Progress Report #2 Sept. 24, 2012

                                                                                                            September 21, 2012

Dear Parents and Guardians,

On the opposite side of this sheet is your son/daughter’s progress report. In class we recently finished a unit on Megacities. These are the 21 cities in the world that have populations larger than 10 million people. We watched a few short clips that illustrated the differences between life in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tokyo, Japan, Shanghai, China, London, UK and Mexico City, Mexico. The students compared and contrasted the cities’ differences and similarities. In class we discussed how many of the first-world megacities can learn from those of the third world and vice versa. The mini-unit helped the students see an unfamiliar to them way of life. If you are interested in watching the documentary it is called Andrew Marr’s Megacities and is available streaming from Amazon.com.

This week we are going to start a unit analyzing early human migrations from Prehistory to 1000 BC. Students will be able to identify the difference between BC and AD (Which is now called CE for “Common Era”). As a class we will be studying four river valley civilizations, the Mesopotamia, Nile, Indus and Huang He. The students will use their five themes of geography to analyze each of these civilizations.

I mentioned to the students that I am collecting used tennis balls to put on the legs of the chairs and desks to protect the floor, if you have any please send them with your student.

On the Progress Report, if a grade is shown as a 59, it was NOT turned in to me by your child. If a grade is shown as a 60, the actual grade scored by your child was BELOW a 60.

As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Thanks for your time,

Mr. Grove

grovety(at )hickoryschools.net

828-327-6300 x108

Class Blog: www.grovesclass.blogspot.com

PS. If you want to see some really cool old historical photos embedded into Google Maps, check out www.historypin.com  

No Current Events this week! Sept 17-20th, 2012

Because it is a 4 day student week and we do not have school on Friday, students DO NOT have a Current Event Assignment for this week!


If student's have already completed the assignment it will be used for next weeks Current Event Assignment (CE 5)

Students will have a quiz Tuesday Sept 18th on Daily Geography Week 5 and 6.
Thanks
Mr. Grove

Current Events Weekly Form

Here is a link to a digital copy of the Current Events Form.


Here is a link to the NEW and Improved Current Events Sheet. Thanks Caroline! :)



Download File 

Andrew Marr's Megacities

We are watching a few short clips in class from this excellent Documentary.

For better or worse, tens of millions of others across the globe are making similar migrations, for a variety of reasons, to teeming metropolises, some of which have ballooned to over ten million residents. At that population point, the vaguely science-fiction term urban planners have coined is “megacity”. In BBC One’s recent three-chapter documentary Megacities, BAFTA-winning journalist Andrew Marr examines five immense cities – London, Dhaka, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Tokyo – to reveal their triumphs and tragedies, and discover what makes these unwieldy leviathans tick.
More information on the Megacities Documentary Episode synopsises   BBC Page