During the summer holidays I had some contact from Bob Harvey about the Geograph project. Back in 2005, I really saw the value of the whole idea, but then along came Google Street View. Bob’s message inspired me to revisit the site and add some photographs that I’ve taken in the intervening years since I first joined. Most of my contributions are of locations that a Google camera will never get to see…
As term time approached, I started to thinking about some ways that I could try and incorporate Geograph images into more lessons. Here’s a list of some ideas:
1) Teaching copyright issues
2) Lessons on landscapes – based on the ideas of Alan Parkinson and this resource from the Tate and resulting in work like this. One of the learning tasks in my SoW gets students to imagine a recipe for the British landscape and this could be suitably illustrated with a Geograph photo.
3) Overlaying map symbols directly onto Geograph photos in PPT (I need a copy of the OS symbols as individual png files with transparent backgrounds. If anyone has done this already, let me know!)
4) Recognising urban zones / different kinds of land use and general photo annotation practice.
5) Imagining the Geograph view using sketches (as it might have looked in the past / the future)
6) Drawing a sketch map based on solely on the view in a Geograph photo.
For my new Year 8 groups I decided to just rip the entire Geograph idea off and create a mini version for the local area. The idea is to get students to think about how to describe places using geographical terminology and link features with maps. They will use their phones to take an image from the local area. This will be uploaded using a form (Jot Form is perfect for this) and they will add location information using Digimaps. Finally they will describe the features of their photograph and the project will hopefully result in a nice piece of display work. Who knows, some might even contribute their work to the Geograph site!
Here’s the outline of the lesson:
