Resources for all:

• Future Learn has a range of online courses. Browse by subject, and find the specialist area that you like! https://www.futurelearn.com/subjects – most are free to register, but you may have to pay a small fee if you want to claim a certificate and accreditation!
• Harvard University have put many courses online via EdX (https://www.edx.org/). Like Future Learn, mainly free, but some will come with accreditation/certification costs.
• Oxford’s Continuing Education Department have put together a curated bunch of links for interesting and philosophical debates (https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/about/curious-minds)
• Shakespeare’s Globe has put many of their plays and shows online (https://globeplayer.tv/)
• Many of the world’s best museums have got fully interactive guides online: check out the ten recommended by The Guardian
• The Schools’ History Project is running an online competition in conjunction with Peter Frankopan: http://www.schoolshistoryproject.co.uk/news/

Geography-Specific Resources

• Royal Meteorological Society’s online weather course is available free through Future Learn: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/come-rain-or-shine
• Royal Geographical Society’s Monday night lecture series is available online for all, with some for Members only: https://www.rgs.org/all/?categories=MondayNightLectures
• The United States Geological Survey (USGS) have published their lecture series online, too. Check it out here
• Colouring London, a project with the Ordnance Survey and UCL’s CASA: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2020/01/colouring-london/
• Earth Online: https://earth.nullschool.net – hours of fun, right there!
• The Rainfall Rescue Project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/edh/rainfall-rescue) is seeking volunteers to help do data analysis and transcription of old records in to digital format. Sign up, do your bit?

We face unprecedented teaching challenges over the next few weeks, so here is a simple idea that I’d like to share. It should be do-able for everyone with just Google Maps and a simple template – but there’s fun extensions if you want!

Introduction

Geographers – and estate agents, surveyors, people of all kinds – are always trying to find out how “nice” an area is. Better areas can get attractive offers and developments, and their houses are worth more. Worse areas can lead to problems and disadvantages.

To try and make a fair judgement, we have come up with a template that helps us ask useful questions about an Environment. We call it an Environmental Quality Survey. One is attached here, but you can make your own.

The aim is to use Google Earth’s Street View to compare areas – which do we think is better, or worse, and why?

Instructions

Read through the Environmental Quality Survey together, and decide what the questions mean. You’ll want to be confident that you all know the same things and would score them in the same way. You might want to practice – with everyone using the same area as a ‘test’, so that you can try and calibrate your scores.

Then split up in to pairs or small groups. Open Google Earth, and try to find a place that you know. Look around it, using Street View (drop the little yellow man!).

What can you judge? What can you see?

Complete your Environmental Quality Survey, and discuss your results.

Repeat for as many locations as you want to do! Make careful notes about what you see, and what you conclude for each Environmental Quality Survey.

Questions for you to answer:

Which area scored best, and why? Does everyone agree?

Which area scored worst, and why? Does everyone agree?

How could you map or present this? Could you colour in areas to show their score? Put a pin with a colour on it?

Which things are most important in judging how good an area is?

Which things are least important?

Which things can we judge very easily using Google Earth?

Which things have we struggled with?

Extension:

If your teacher can arrange it, why not try to exchange your ideas with another class who are working on this project? You might be able to learn lots about different parts of the country, and meet many other students just like you!

You can show them around your area, and they can show you around theirs – and then you can compare scores and discuss ideas.

Today has been one of the worst days of my teaching career. While I have been a tutor in different areas of schools, I’ve never had to face the hardest components of pastoral leadership, thank God – the loss of a child or parent, or some of the awful safeguarding concerns that must inevitably be shouldered and felt by so many of my colleagues. I’ve been shielded.

Today was hard for all of us. We made a decision to close our school early, on staffing/ratios. It was, and is, the right call.

But we ended on a real note of despair. Somehow, I hadn’t read it, and hadn’t expected it. Students weren’t celebrating; there was no release of pressure or tension or stress – only heartbreak.

That their Ball was cancelled.

That they were leaving, likely now.

That they weren’t ready for this – emotionally, or in any way.

I understand – and completely sympathise – with the fact that the Government doesn’t have a ready made contingency plan for what they mean when they say “exams won’t happen this academic year”, but that awful uncertainty has meant a real loss of direction for students. I don’t blame them for that – this isn’t that kind of discussion!

I had four out of my five lessons today with “exam classes” – who hadn’t a clue what to do. Some were in tears. Many were drifting.

I know that we’ll have time to talk strategies, and how we’ll respond to exams later. I also do some work with co-ordinating UCAS & Higher Education, so the chance for me to be positive about admissions and the hope that Unviersities will all come together in this was a settler.

But the thing that offered the most hope was to talk, with love, about subjects and learning. Okay. We might not have this hoop to jump through for exams – but that was never the thing we loved anyway, was it? What excites us? What do we want to read? What do we want to find out? Over the day, my stack of “interesting Geography” books in my classroom have been depleted – as staff and students alike found a glimmer of ‘oh, I love that’, or ‘that looks cool’.

For Year 11, it’s about what can we do to inspire you for Sixth Form. For Year 13, what can you do to inspire yourself for your chosen university or post-18 pathway.

I want to do more.

I want to collate a list of online FREE education resources. Not for exams, specs and A Level subjects – but for joyous, specialist, high level things. Harvard’s amazing EdX resource, FutureLearn’s platform – I want to be able to share with students, and say – here is a world, and you’ve got time to play. I want to be able to give them new worlds to conquer, skills to learn – and to be able to talk to them in September, and say “what did you learn this summer? What are you proud of?

I’ll collate a list here – please add your suggestions in comments or on Twitter!

What else?