GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

“When others get off the train to finally go home, Leonie Müller stays behind. That’s because she already is home: The train is her apartment, and she says she likes it that way. She bought a subscription that allows her to board every train in the country free. Now, Müller washes her hair in the train bathroom and writes her college papers while traveling at a speed of up to 190 mph. She says that she enjoys the liberty she has experienced since she gave up her apartment.”

Tags: mobility, transportation, housing, popular culture, Europe, Germany. 

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

“So it’s welcome news that Google wants to make this all much, much simpler with its brand new Project Sunroof tool. Plug in your address, and Google uses its aerial imagery capabilities to help you figure out whether solar power might be a worthwhile idea. (The project is still in its early stages; here’s Google’s announcement from Monday.)

For now, data is only available for selected parts of the country. But let’s look at a sample address given in Redwood City, California. The tool first calculates both how big the roof is and how much sun it gets per year.”

Tags:  mapping, google.

Source: www.vox.com

We hear the names of these places in the news constantly, but can you actually locate them on a map?

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

I do enjoy a good current events map quiz.  Yes, geography is about more than just locating things on the map, but that is still a pretty foundational spatial-thinking skill to build upon. If you want some more quizzes with perhaps more direct applicability in the classroom, click here for online regional quizzes.         

Tags: political, geopolitics, fun, trivia.

Source: www.thehumanimprint.com

This outstanding infographic from the Human Imprint is an excellent summary of the AP Human Geography exam and gives some valuable insights to prepare students to pass the exam.  This is well worth the read for any APHG teacher.    

Tags: APHG, infographic.

“How deep is that icy blue water on Greenland’s ice sheet? Dr. Allen Pope, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, is using data from the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite to find out. In this video, Dr. Pope shares what he sees when he looks at a Landsat image of the Greenland ice sheet just south of the Jakobshavn Glacier.

Because the lakes are darker than the ice around them, they absorb more energy from the sun. A little bit of melt concentrates in one place, and then melts more, establishing a feedback mechanism accelerating the growth of the lake. When the lakes get big enough they can force open fractures that then drill all the way down to the bed of the glacier, transporting this water to the base where it can temporarily speed up the flow of the ice.”

Tags: physical, geomorphology, landforms, erosion, climate change, Greenland, remote sensing, geospatial.

Source: www.youtube.com

Explore the popularity of some of the world’s favourite foods on Instagram. Discover Instagram’s capital of curry, which cities are big on burgers, and where pulled pork is most prolific.

Source: photoworld.com

I was talking to a good friend about the geographic distribution of poutine after watching the silliest YouTube video. (Montreal is famous for it’s poutine, but is in equally widespread throughout Quebec?  Canada?  Is there a core/domain/sphere areas to be mapped? These are the questions that plague geographers.).  True, this map has it’s limitations; Instagram hashtag data isn’t normalized so the biggest cities tend to pop out more easily, access/use of Instagram isn’t uniform, etc.  Still, what a great map to show some geographic applications of social media data.  This sort of map also nicely shows the spatial concepts of region, diffusion, concentration and distribution.  

Tags: visualization, social media, mapping, culture, diffusion, popular culture, regions, food.

“Tourists and locals experience cities in strikingly different ways. To see just how different these two worlds are, have a look at the map of Washington D.C. above based on where people take photos. The red bits indicate photos taken by tourists, while the blue bits indicate photos taken by locals and the yellow bits might be either.”

Source: brilliantmaps.com

It amazes me how the same city can provide such diverse experiences to so many people.  Growing up in San Diego, going to the zoo was only our family’s radar when company was over and they wanted to “see San Diego.”  Their vision of the place, what is iconic and what is quintessentially symbolic of that place, was different from my own. 

Questions to Ponder: What are some other ways (besides local/tourist) that a place can be experienced by other groups?  How many of these 136 cities can you identify from these tourist/local patterns? 

Tags: mapping, social media, urban, place, culture, landscape, tourism.