Nelamangala Market

We visited the market during our visit to Southern India in February this year. (This is a my experiment to find out what happens when I embed a Flickr slideshare into this blog.)

Dual Maps

Dual Maps is a stunning combination of StreetView Google Maps and Virtual Earth. Thank you to Noel Jenkins for sharing this website. I think it's great!

A new photo pack for Chembakolli

Action Aid recently published a new photo-pack for Chembakolli: Life in an Indian Village.

This is definitely the best photo-pack of the village to date. I really like the way that the writers of the pack have chosen to combine a full sized photograph on one side of a card with information and photographs on the reverse as this really helps us to see `the story' behind the picture. Something that I feel is crucial element of any resource on distant place.

I usually look at the photographs in a pack with a fairly critical eye, even more so since my recent visit to Southern India. The photographs in this pack are of good quality and show very positive images of the people who live in the area. These photocards also raise a number of issues about the lives of people in the village which could usefully be explored using a 'Philosophy for Children' approach. If you are still using the original pack and want to continue to teach about village life in India, then this pack is very worth considering.

You can find out more about this resource on the Action Aid website.

Further details can be found on the Action Aid website. If you order by the end of May you will get £10 off the catalogue price by placing a telephone order on 01460 23 8000 and quoting "Gudalur".

Mapping Images the Digital Way

I'm sharing the presentation that I created for my workshop at our recent conference in Manchester. My aim when preparing the presentation was to create slides with links to other useful web-sites and to provide one or two `how to ...' sections. These include `How to locate images that have been shared under the Creative Commons Licence' on Flickr' and a slightly updated version of creating a `Google My Map'.

Mapping images the digital way

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Getting ready for the GA Conference in Manchester

I've just about completed my presentation for the Geographical Association Conference in Manchester (17th - 18th April).

I'm running a session called `Mapping Images the Digital Way' as an introduction for teachers to the use of online image galleries and online mapping. The central aim is to create a `My Walks' map using Google `My Maps' and to introduce the Northumbria University website called My Walks.

I'm currently experimenting with the integration of the Google suite of programmes and this post is a result of `clicking on' the Blog link at the bottom of the Picasa 3 editing page. I think Picasa is one of the best of the free photo-editing tool and it now comes with some great new features, for example a simple tool to create a video from still images. Because it is so straightforward to use I will be recommending it for simple editing projects in the classroom.

As the focus of the session is on creating digital maps to display the location of photographs I will be demonstrating how easy it is to drag images from the online gallery onto the online Google Map. I intend to use my Dartmouth collection to demonstrate how easy this is.

Silvepura a village in India

I'm slowly trying to sort out my ideas and thinking about my visit to India. I've begun to add images to my Flickr India gallery.

As someone who likes to be able to locate places on maps one of my first activity has been to build a customised map of the locality of Silvepura using Google `My Maps' which you can see on the left. (Click on the link above to be taken to the website.) This is a work in progress and I intend to keep adding images to this and possibly some short personal `stories' too.


Cat and Caroline wrote a`blog' for the children in their school while we were still in India which gives a wonderful sense of our visit.

I kept a journal while we were in India and I'm slowly adding some of my journal entries to my other blog site, Primary Geography.

Originally I set this second site up because I wanted to learn how to use Edublogs. I think Edublogs is probably a more trusted site for use with children I decided to use this site as a way of sharing my experiences of people and places around the world and hope some of the ideas and entries might prove valuable.

In the Picture

Last Monday (9th March) saw me supporting a group of Wakefield NQT's to use digital images in their teaching of the humanities.

I have been developing activities around the use of ICT frames for some years now. The idea being that the teacher inserts an appropriate image into a pre-created ICT framework.

I wrote a CPD unit on this theme a couple of years ago which can be viewed at Geography Teaching Today website and I've added other resources at various times to the Geographical Association website under the heading Visual Geography

In my introduction to the day I shared with the teachers some thinking about the links between visual literacy and print based literacy, drawing on an chapter in the GA Primary Geography handbook that was written by Margaret Mackintosh. You can view the introductory PowerPoint below:

In the Picture: developing visual literacy through geography and history

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