GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

The Ocean State didn’t just place last in our overall rankings for the second year in a row, it also finished in the bottom five of four individual categories in 2012.  A  little Providence, please.

The business leaders and politicians in Rhode Island are working hard to attract more investment and greater job opportunities.  Rhode Island’s only neighbors, Connecticut and Massachusetts attract massive amounts of venture capital compared to the Ocean State (per capita as well, so Rhode Island can’t just claim that it’s a matter of scale). With 11% unemployment (2nd worst in the country), the economic geography of Rhode Island has problems.  What factors have led to this economic situation?  Possible solutions?

See on www.cnbc.com

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

This map is a graphical representation of the Dashboard’s available data on foreign assistance appropriations by fiscal year. The darker a country’s shading appears on the map, the more funding that U.S. Government country office received in that fiscal year. Users can switch between fiscal years by using the dropdown box in the top right corner of the page. Users can choose a country by clicking the map or by selecting the name of the country from the drop down box above.

See on www.foreignassistance.gov

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

An OverlapMap is a map of one part of the world that overlaps a different part of the world. OverlapMaps show relative size.

The above overlap map is the United Kingdom compared to the state of Pennsylvania.  This is an very simple way to demonstrate the true size of remote places, and ‘bring the discussion home.’  This site is as simple and intuitive as it is powerful and easily applicable.  This is a keeper.  

See on overlapmaps.com

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

This is clever.

See on xkcd.com

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

Not long ago in a supermarket not so far away. Help fight the dark side of the farm. Rate the film, favorite the film, comment the film and subscribe to our …

This is horribly cheesy and from an incredibly biased perspective, but it does embody how many see the organic movement (and is quite entertaining for old Star Wars buffs like me). 

See on www.youtube.com

See on Scoop.it – Social Media Classroom

Conan Heiselt on TechSmith worked with a focus group to discover what make ‘best practices’ guide for making the most engaging screencasts (videos that show a computer screen).  This awesome PDF is the result.   

See on assets.techsmith.com

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s a global conversation anyone can join anytime. Eavesdropping on the world, what what!

While many educators have been using http://popvssoda.com/ to show the linguistic regions in the United States, this is a similar map, with the added social media component.  To map out these regions, the cartographer used the word choice on geo-tagged tweets as the data source.  For another twitter, map, the following link shows which regions are most actively engaged on Twitter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/06/top-countries-on-twitter_n_1653915.html

What do these regions show us?  What types of regions are these?

See on blog.echen.me

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

Today was the launch for the new AP Human Geogaphy Teacher Community site administered by College Board.  This new community allows for more effective discussion management and resource posting than the listerv did.  You can access the community by going to http://apcommunity.collegeboard.org/
and logging in with your same user id and password that you use for accessing AP scores and such. If you, or someone you know, is not an audit-approved teacher then they are still welcome to join the community (and I quote, “all educators are welcome”). They will simply go to the same site, click on Human Geography in the drop-down box, and request to join. All membership requests will be processed as quickly as possible.  I will most certainly still post the majority of my links here and at http://geographyeducation.org but hope to participate will many of you on this new site as well. 

See on apcommunity.collegeboard.org

See on Scoop.it – Geography Education

This map of all the world’s recorded earthquakes between 1898 and 2003 is stunning. As you might expect, it also creates a brilliant outline of the plates of the Earth’s crust—especially the infamous “Ring of Fire” around the Pacific Plate.

The plate boundaries are amazingly vivid in this geovisualization of the all the earthquakes over  a 105 year span.  How did scientist orginally come up with the theory of plate tectonics?  How did spatial thinking and mapping play a role in that scientific endeavor?

See on boingboing.net