Climate Change Copenhagen

This Oxfam produced resource allows students to understand the importance of governmental decisions of issues which will affect their futures.

It has teacher resources and guides to further understand what the Copenhagen climate change talks are all about

Against All Odds - UNHCR

This online game, produced by the United Nation's refugee support agency, the UNHCR provides secondary students with a dramatic experience of a young person fleeing oppression in their homeland, the difficulty of finding acceptance and starting a new life in a foreign society.
The web facts section provides information about human rights and international law, as well as individual refugees’ stories.
The teachers' section provides advice for teachers with awareness, comprehension, interactive and discussion exercises along with an extensive series of web links.

The Burning Season

This is an amazing documentary directed by Australian Cathy Henkel and narrated by our very own Hugh Jackman. It's focus is about deforestation in Indonesia and wiping out the orangutan population. It follows environmentalist Dorjee Sun while he takes on climate change and the devastation of carbon emissions.

Here is a website based around the burning season: Ten things you can do to change the world

and the official Burning Season website

GREAT RESOURCE for SOSE and Geography teachers

SSSI and Q150- linking spatial technology with Queensland history

The Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute along with the Q150 program have developed a free teaching resources that aim to involve students in the history of Qld....

Check it out, it could be a way of linking the Q150 initiative into your classrooms using technology!! the site has a specific tab for schools and includes a 3 part process but these can be used as since topics:

1. Changes over 150 years,
2. Icons of Qld, and
3. Future predictions.

The google map hasn't been updated with the 40 survey markers as yet, but I'm hoping they will have it completed before it's Q150+1

WWW.Where's that resource?: KFC lawsuit: crippling a young girl from salmonella

the denial from KFC.....

the shop in question only has a performance ranking of 41%... I wonder how often these outlets get reviewed?

It seems that there may be a disconnection between practices and policies which are made at the corporate level and what is practiced by the young employee's at the ground level.

WWW.Where's that resource?: KFC lawsuit: crippling a young girl from salmonella

fathers view

KFC lawsuit: crippling a young girl from salmonella

I'm interested in following this law suit. Much of food poisoning happens in the home, however after walking into a KFC last week and seeing boxes of beverages sitting on top of the rubbish bin in plain view of customers, I wondered what was goinng on behind the sceens and I am not surprised that cases like this are occurring.

All food establishments have procedures to be adhered to, but as a chef I have observed and heard of many of these steps that are not followed. If outcomes are happening, much like what has happened to young Monika Samaan from eating a 'Twister' it makes you wonder where that food has come from, what processes the food has undergone and what are we actually putting in our mouths.

Global Community

The Wombat: This is a catchy flash video from many videos at Global MindShift.org

Blurb from the site: The wombat speaks, and he's smarter than you, so listen up! In less than a minute, this rapid-fire

animation tells you everything you need to know about how to get along on earth for the n

ext million years.

Andrews perspective on the world: here is a 15 year old boy with a skateboard, a Mohawk and a t-shirt that says life sucks.... however his trip to the principals office didn't get him into as much trouble as he though he would. RECOMMENDED!!!

The Bio-Daversity Code

The BioDaversity Code: this is an animation based on the Davinci Code is about the importance of the food web and it's human interaction and misuse. It is backed by the WWF and has a great deal of information behind the animation.

After watching the this animation I clicked on the learn more icon and found great presentations by Earthscope on important components that are associated with the web of life, they include :

• The big picture overview
• Global Warming
• Invasive species
• Amazon Rainforest
• Mangrove forests
• Coral Reefs

if you skip the presentation you are taken to a great deal of background information to support the presentation.

World Food Program: games

Food Force: This video game might be useful to introduce issues with hunger in the junior grades. It is a 227MB file so it may not be something for an entire computer lab, but you could use it as a reward for students that finish their work early...

Free Rice: is a vocab game that students could use in down time, or to increase their literacy skills instead of solitaire. For each answer you get right 10 grains of rice are donated through the UN World Food program to help hunger, so students are not only learning but assisting in the fight against starvation at the same time.

WFP also has a section particularly for students and teachers here. there are loads of resources for the classroom and would be a very useful web page for Qld Senior Geography unit- Feeding the Worlds People.

It is really important for students to gain an understanding of the perspectives and issues of others on a global scale, these games may be a starting point to aide and support deeper learning experiences.

Chris Jordan - Ted Talks

Chris Jordan is a large scale photographer, he's been able to demonstrate statistics of humans interaction with resources though images.

Fantastic resource in the classroom to allow students to think outside the box.

the inspiration of my blog

After hearing about blogs and wiki's all day, and not being able to attend Rebecca Nicholas' presentation, I just had to come home and check this out... I've been meaning to get it up and running for some time, but seeing Rebecca's blog was the push I needed, she has a fantastic blog and very informative for geographers and teachers in general, so check it out. Thanks Rebecca and happy blogging.

the first of many resources

Well... the conference... where do I start?

I would first like to acknowledge everything I put on here as only a link or an idea to a resource in the view that it should be used for open and collaborative purposes. Therefore, I you see anything on here that may be the intellectual property of yours or others, I apologise and please let me know and I will remove it.

So for many purposes what I put on may only be a link to a site which I have found useful.....

After sitting in on Mick Law's presentation (from Countour Education), I thought about ways I could use google maps in a practical sense... also, I wanted to demonstrate how easy these maps are to manipulate to other non-geographers (such as my home ec colleagues) to introduce them to mapping and it's possible uses in the classroom. So, to demonstrate this I thought it would be a good idea, and a collaborative approach to set an open google map up (free for anyone to change, on the same view as wikipedia) and allow graduating students from QUT (to begin with- it doesn't have to be just QUT) to map their location after graduation.

View QUT Teacher Placement in a larger map

I feel that if this map can be open, many 'new teachers' will be able to gain a spatial awareness of the networks around them and have the ability to contact those closest to them for support etc.

Lets hope it works

To view the collaborative map click here

Where to begin?

After attending the GTAQ Conference today, I was blown away by the amount of resources I obtained, hard copy, visual, and digital..... So it got me thinking..... over the last four years of my degree I have gathered so many resources, only to file then (physically or digitally) never to be seen again, and if and when I do need them- when I'm teaching, how will I track them down.

Well of course for my some of my digital resources (the ones I've remembered to save on my computer) I could just do a general search and I would find it... but there is no real way of giving the file a description or comment (there probably is I just don't know yet).

Then there's the web sites you get told about in passing, it gets written on a scrap of paper and never to be seen again..... or you put it in a safe place, file it and magically it disappears.

Also, I'm always emailing fellow classmates resources and handy web sites to visit in their spare time (procrastination time), in between facebook posts. So I decided that I could 'hit 2 birds with the 1 stone', I would blog my resources - both Home Ec and Geography, and give a brief description, that way I know what the resource is and where to find it..... along with anything else that might pop up..... we'll see how we go.