1. Today we were evaluating the accuracy of our forecasts of the routes taken by the Geldingadalur lava flows.
A THREAD ON TEACHING GEOGRAPHY *WITH* GIS
2. Yesterday, pupils had been using ArcGIS Scene Viewer to read the topography of the land to try to forecast & justify possible routes.
Reference made to
• thalweg
• how lava can rewrite the underlying topography to effectively flow up hil and overcome topographical barriers
3. We then compared our predictions with what has actually happened and discovered three categories of evaluation.
A surprise flow further to the west had happened. Currently it is feeding into the Nattahagi valley. But could it go elsewhere...?
4. We needed to be careful to re-evaluate places at risk from the - including ascertaining if there is a possible route towards the town of Grindavik, especially if the lava overtops a small ridge and flows into the valley to the west.
5. Some pupils predicted that it might flow more to the south, using the Elevation Profile tool to read the topography and find the thalweg route to the sea.
6. Some, however, saw topographical routes further west, potentially threatening the town of Grindavik.
7. Next up, we will examine, evaluate and choose management options.
• Hard engineering - can you control a lava flow? What are the options? How effective are they?
• Soft engineering - should we adopt a 'managed retreat' style approach with Grindavik?
The drama unfolds...
8. Using Scene Viewer unleashing powerful, generative learning with my pupils. They take the theoretical knowledge we've been building up & apply it in an evaluative manner.
Great geographical skills & understanding being developed.
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** Schools have been getting ready for this: a thread **
In many ways, I don't blame folks who tweet things like this. The media coverage of the schools situation in Covid-19 rarely talks about the quiet, day-in-day-out work that schools have been doing these past 9 months. 1/
Instead, the coverage focused on the dramatic, last minute policy announcements by the government, or of dramatic stories of school closures, often accompanied by photos of socially distanced classrooms that those of us in schools this past term know are from a fantasy land. 2/
If that's all you see & hear, it's no wonder that you may not know what has actually been happening in schools to meet the challenges. So, if you'd like a glimpse behind the curtain, then read on. For this is something of what teachers & schools leaders have been up to. 3/
"Google Classroom can do their job for them! It may deliver info on a screen but that's it!"
Face to face is better than remote, of course. That's why I've been happy to be teaching in school since August and interacting with my pupils in my classroom. 2/5
But to make the above claim is to show a fundamental misunderstanding on the nature of teaching - and of the significant progress (through both research & experience) that teachers have made in delivering remote learning over these past 9 months. 3/5
Useful recap session with Y12 on the fieldwork paper. I used a retrieval practice approach (low stakes quiz) to recap on some content covered in June. Pleasingly, good recall was generally shown by most who had engaged. #nigeogmeet
But one common misconception on river velocity remained. This was one that I had identified in June & tried to address in one of my videos. I had used an analogy to do with streamlining of vehicles & related that to friction & its impact on velocity.
Interestingly, once I showed the photos of the analogy, that was enough to trigger the memory for most of the role of attrition making the bedload smaller & more rounded and thus exerting less frictional drag on the water. Full video here: