This course will focus on the teaching and assessment of geography throughout the primary phase linked to the requirements of the new Ofsted Framework and the National Curriculum. We will investigate what key knowledge and skills children require to be successful geographers.

During the session we will consider:

• Auditing, monitoring and evaluating geography provision in your school
• Progression and assessment of geographical skills, knowledge and concepts
• Developing the use of ICT and technology including digital mapping
• Creative ideas for activities including fieldwork
• Sharing of good practice and resource ideas

This course is suitable for those new to geography subject leadership or those who require a refresher linked to recent Ofsted developments.

This course will be run by:

Rowena Pryor, Teaching and Learning Consultant, Lancashire County Council

Supported by Peter O’Hare from Digimap for Schools and Darren Bailey from The Ordnance Survey Education team. 

For further details contact peter.ohare@ed.ac.uk

Book your place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/primary-geography-subject-leaders-yorkshire-network-meeting-tickets-61146658301

#Outdoorclassroom day is on the 23rd of May this year. It comes at a particularly apt time as we see the huge positive wave of young people getting involved in activism to highlight the environmental crisis our world is in.

Digimap for Schools is a fantastic resource for planning and delivering these outdoor classrooms. Our maps can be used to create risk assessments and plan activity locations for the day. It can also be used to show the changes that have happened in you schools location over the past 130 years using our historical maps. The aerial imagery can be used with Ordnance Survey maps to give pupils a sense of place and explore their local area and environment.

This resource (above) for example is great for getting pupils to do some biological monitoring and understanding the importance of the species in our environment.  This resource was developed for the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence but is also perfect for any KS2 activities in England and Wales.

Today is #WorldPoetryDay and I thought’d I’d highlight one of our free resources. Landscape Poetry https://dfsresources.edina.ac.uk/resource/landscape-poetry

Its a great resource for Primary School and I’d thought I’d just highlight some of the curriculum links it has:

Knowledge and Skills: Reading and interpreting maps/drawing areas on maps/using a key/using eight cardinal points/using grid references to locate places.

I thought I’d share a couple of tweets and photos we received last week from some of our schools!

It’s really interesting to see the wide range of mediums that our maps are being consumed on by pupils….  we have the full range from paper maps, laptops, desktops and Interactive White Boards.

The variety of maps being used is also very encouraging with Ordnance Survey and Aerial maps being used by schools to explore their local area, but also one of the schools is using our 1890’s historic mapping to explore the impact the Victorians had on todays infrastructures in cities!

We were recently demo’ing some scenarios of how to use the historical maps with current day Ordnance Survey maps and we thought we’d share the maps we created.

This example is of coastal erosion in Happisburgh in Norfolk. By using the historic maps and our drawing and measurement tools you can trace the coastline in the 1890’s, the 1950’s and the current coastline. You can also use the measurement to see that in some areas the coast has eroded about 150 metres..

I ‘think’ in the GCSE and A-Level NEA’s (though don’t quote me! I’m not a teacher it talks about data presentation and using secondary data sources; and on both fronts Digimap for School more than covers these specifications.

This week we ran a webinar on Customising maps with Digimap for Schools.  It was warmly received by the attendees so we thought we’d make it public on our youtube channel.

We showcase some of the fantastic maps that have been created using Digimap for Schools and simply run through the process of how people have created them.

Yesterday we ran a webinar on using Digimap for Schools in Primary Schools.  The feedback from the session was so positive and encouraging we have decided to post it on our blog, facebook and twitter pages.

The opportunities for using Digimap for Schools in Primary schools are vast, with some many applications across the curriculum!  Please have a look at our video of yesterdays session below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the summer we’ve taken the opportunity to update some of the maps used in Digimap for Schools. The Ordnance Survey have been working with their Mastermap collection and had a slight rejig of some of their classifications and added some new data schema’s. (at this stage you can tell I’m not a professional cartographer ;-))

As a result there have been some additional classifications added to their data which allows for better cartographic representation of the data itself (i.e. they can put more information on the maps). To the casual observer who maybe doesn’t have a forensic eye for detail many of these changes may not be glaringly obvious but we have found a few examples of how the data has changed the maps for the better! We found that some of the best examples of this tend to be in the coastal regions and below is an example of a before and after:

As you can see form the top image the area is simply classified as shingle and rock, whereas the image below is much more refined in giving better classification of the areas.

Anyhow this was just a quick update to let you know that some of the maps may have changed slightly (for the better ;-))