UK's Greatest Mountain

Leaving aside the old debate about when is a mountain a mountain ?
Just voted for my favourite mountain on this poll.

Which is yours ?
Cast your vote.

Here's a picture of my favourite mountain.

Image from Flickr user spodzone - shared under Creative Commons license for which many thanks....

National Geographic Talk

Here's some photos from the recent talk that Dan Raven Ellison and his son Seb did at the National Geographic store in London, based on their ROUTE 125 exhibition.

The pictures were taken by Jose Farinha.
They can be viewed on the store's FACEBOOK page.

What if London were a National Park ?

A nice piece by Dan Raven Ellison on his blog. We have plenty of rural  national parks, so why not an urban one ?

One to discuss with students perhaps.

What if London were a National Park

Keeping Cheddar Gorgeous ?

“This is the equivalent to trying to build a cable car in front of Buckingham Palace. Cheddar Gorge is of international importance. There are better ways of driving business without destroying the very asset people come to see. It is far better to retain the uniqueness of the place.”  

Helen Bonser-Wilton, assistant director of operations at the National Trust.

Year 7 explored the plans to build a cable car in Cheddar Gorge.

Over half term, this has come into the news once again (it looks like we were ahead of the game here), and here are a few links that you could follow to bring the story up to date.
We may take a look at this in the next week or so, although we have other things that we have to do before we move into the exam week, which will be on us before we know it.

First, there's a clip from West Country News.... (may only work for a limited time)
A few different opinions expressed here...

Also an article from the Daily Mail, which shows some mocked up images of how the cable car will look, and describes the plans.

Also an article in the Independent

Followed by two local papers:

- the Cheddar Valley Gazette
- the Weston Mercury


The National Trust and the CPRE are both against the planned development in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB)
CPRE have produced a report on what they call 'England's Threatened Landscapes'
Click HERE to  download a report and also map and other materials relating to this report.
Cheddar Gorge is included on the map of threatened landscapes...

Yorkshire Landscape....

Getting ready for 2014...

SAGT Conference Seminar - 2013

My seminars are available to view on my SLIDESHARE page.

SAGT Presentation from GeoBlogs

I referred to Paul Cornish’s useful diagram from the GA’s curriculum planning site, which asks questions relating to the choice of case studies.

Hopefully these move away from ‘the one in the textbook’… and are influenced by student and teacher choice and also experiences.

I used the idea from Doreen Massey’s lecture where she referred to mountains themselves as ‘migrants’ in that they were constantly moving and changing, and how maps are a surface on which millions of stories are told.

The idea of curriculum making came through, as did the idea of telling stories. Geography means 'writing the Earth' of course, and there are lots of opportunities for this to happen in familiar landscapes. I talked about teaching about mountains in the Fens, where the highest point was only 26m above sea level.

I used an extract from Robert MacFarlane's 'The Old Ways' along with 'Digimap for Schools'

There were also some ideas from Noel Jenkins on ‘grabbing’ and appropriating landscapes using Google SketchUp – which he added to with models from the SketchUp Warehouse.
I mentioned Tony Cassidy's Facebook idea with Liz Smith examples.

Dropbox folder of resources was shared with the delegates. Thanks to the fifty or so delegates who chose to come to my session...

If you would like to have access to the main written resource, drop me a line...

Yorkshire the third best region in the world...

According to a recent survey...

This Channel 4 report provides more information on the survey...