"Look at it this way"

If you live within reasonable travelling distance of the Peak District, you might be interested in a poetry / geography / history event being organised by my friend Rob Hindle. Blitz A descent in the traces of the first bombing raid on Sheffield, 12 December 1940 Longbarrow Press invites you to join Rob Hindle on a walk in the traces of the Blitz: Sunday 12 December Meet at 1.30pm prompt on Platform A, Sheffield Bus Interchange The walk will start on Hathersage Road near the village of Dore at 2.30pm Total distance approximately 6 miles. There is an opportunity to join the walk at Cafe #9 in Nether Edge (see below) at 4pm. The walk from this point is a little under 3 miles. For the 70th anniversary of the Sheffield Blitz, Rob Hindle has devised a poetry walk that will illuminate the attack on the city by German bombers on 12 December 1940. The journey will begin at Dore Moor and end in Fitzalan Square (Sheffield City Centre), with Rob reading and discussing poems th...

Geographical Association Conference & Exhibition 2011 Programme Plenty of landscape related sessions, to help you expand your physical geography skills...

Vaughan Cornish was one of the most influential geographers of his time. He was born in the 1860s in Suffolk, and had a career spanning 60 years. He was President of the Geographical Association during that time. Last Friday, while putting some boxes down in the warehouse at Solly Street in preparation for the official opening (of which more later), I found a brown cardboard box, which was labelled "Vaughan Cornish Original Prints" and excitedly opened it to find about 50 large prints on thick card, several of them stamped as being entered for the 1904 St. Louis photographic exposition. Took a few images of some of them... Some of them featured pictures of wave forms , an area which Cornish was particularly interested in. I loved the silvered blue finish on some of the prints, which had faded in the century since they had been made, and then hand labelled by Cornish himself. There was also a print taken after an earthquake in the Caribbean, which I had read about him ...

There was plenty of "Look at it this Way" running through the two seminars that I presented at the SAGT Conference 2010. This was the 6th year that I have been up to SAGT, and I'd be happy to come up next year again - I'll probably go with the GA stand even if I don't offer a seminar... The weather was mixed, and the journey up was not without its delays either, but the actual day of the event was bright and cold, and managed to get some nice pictures taken in the evening, as above - looking along the Clyde from the Crowne Plaza hotel and SECC. My presentation was part of the overall conference programme, which included a number of familiar names from previous events, and from English geography circles... I arrived the night before the conference, and over to Hutcheson's Grammar school via a jammed M8 to set up the GA stand. The school was a nice mix of ancient and modern, with a wonderful church for the keynotes. Our hotel was next to the SECC, and ...

Always plenty of landscape inspiration and mapping ideas to flesh out some of the ideas in the toolkit series. And what an issue it is... It has 2 articles by me in it, which is always a bonus... One on the new DIGIMAP service for schools, and one on Amanda Hone's Brown Sign blog , which I have mentioned here before. Also some good ideas from Jeff Stanfield on adding a sporting feel to lessons, and details on the ESRI / GA GIS courses running in cities across the country. Remember that the journal no longer comes into schools in paper form. You can view an e-copy, or download a PDF for reading offline (or printing out) at the MAPPING NEWS page.

The latest issue of Teaching Geography is now available to download by those who subscribe to it.... It features a range of inspirational articles on the theme of place by Mark Jones, Eleanor Rawling, Becky Kitchen, Margaret Roberts and others... Articles range from a teacher visit to Greenland, to the urban re-branding and renaissance of Scarborough... To add a subscription to your GA membership, or to join (and gain access to the last five years of journals in electronic format) click the JOIN THE GA link. PLACE is a big theme in Look at it this Way, and the ideas in this journal could feed in to several of the lessons. Exploring landscapes through poetry is a great way to draw students in, and Mark Jones has provided some thoughtful analysis on this particular tool...

For the last 3 or 4 years now, I have been involved in posting something on BLOG ACTION DAY on the particular theme of the year. The theme this year is WATER.  The Vimeo video sets the scene... Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo . Change.org | Start Petition Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts us all. Our Goal First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action. In 2007 with the theme of the environment, we saw bloggers running en...