Nebraska Change Agent
' I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive.' John W Gardner
Jul
05
Physical Geography Course
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Beth Still on 05-07-2010
The name of the school where I teach is VALTS, but it would be more appropriate if it were named Nirvana. At any given time I have about 40 students and I teach four sections of the same class. Since we are on a quarter system I teach four different classes a year. Our quarters are 8-10 weeks long. Our classes are 2 hour blocks so I see my students twice a week. If you have been doing the math then you have probably figured out that I only see my students 16-20 times during a quarter and that is provided we don’t have any interruptions. One of the deeply held beliefs of my school is that we do not assign homework so all work (including reading) that students do is done in class. After all is said and done my students are actually in their seats for about 35 hours. In reality, they spend more like 30 hours in their seats each quarter. It is indeed a dream situation for most students.
As teachers we have a pretty good deal, too. We have free reign to teach pretty much any topics we desire as long as they fall within the Nebraska standards for our subject area. As a social studies teachers this leaves an entire world of possibilities. I have created each course I have taught over the last five years and I have repeated very little. The one area that I have not explored is geography. For the last two years I have been building a course in my head, but it has not gone any further. I want to teach the basics that go with any physical geography course, but I want students to create something as well. I keep leaning toward having each student create a profile of a national park. They might do this by creating a Facebook page or maybe they would have their own page on our class wiki. I am still wrestling with the details. I would also like to incorporate Google Earth into the mix. I’d love to see them create a tour of their park and record it.
I’m putting these ideas out there for all of you to chime in on. If this was your course what would you do? Remember, I do not have a book. I have combed the net and I cannot find a basic geography text. Ideas and links would be greatly appreciated. Keep in mind that I have classes of 8-10 students. I am not afraid to try anything as long as it has a legitimate educational purpose. My school has a very liberal filtering policy so we can access everything we would need. (See—told you I work in Nirvana.
3 Responses to “Physical Geography Course”
Leave a Reply
-
Recent Visitors
Visitors
© 2012 Nebraska Change Agent Provided by WPMU DEV -The WordPress Experts
Entries
and comments
OceanWide made by Romow.com. Hosted by Edublogs.org
July 5th, 2010 at 2:57 p
Hi, Beth,
While your students are developing their products for the national parks, you might ask them to include some historical background, too. This Library of Congress collection–”Mapping the National Parks”–would be a relevant site, and it is obviously rich in visuals. Here’s the link: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/nphtml/nphome.html
You could also have your students watch this amazing Second Life video of Map Island and the work of map collector David Rumsey: http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2008/3/6/second-life-launch-event-talk There’s a cool overlay map of Yosemite in this video intro.
The Rumsey collections are also located in the gallery view in Google Earth. Your students could search for national parks there.
Hope this helps, and best of luck!
-Mary
July 5th, 2010 at 3:22 p
This is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. Thank you so much! Your tweet caught my attention because I just wrote the post today. I think I have the format of the date set up oddly because it does appear to be written on May 7 instead of July 5.
July 6th, 2010 at 9:25 p
I think google earth would be a great idea. I know you have probably already researched, but there are some really good videos on Youtube that so different ideas on using google earth. Here is a link that you might want to check out. Google Earth