Tuesday, May 28, 2013

GTASA 2013 Conference


Image above: The Home page of GeogSpace.

Links to look at related to this blog
Spatialworlds blog

Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
ACARA website

ACARA Australian Curriculum portal


The 2013 GTASA Conference

On 30 and 31 May the geographers of South Australia have gathered in the Education Development Centre at Hindmarsh to learn, share and discuss geography. As always a great event for all. Here are the GeogSpace launch and workshop presentations. 




Monday, May 20, 2013

Implementation officers workshop


Image above: The Australian Curriculum: Geography on the ACARA site - at last!!.

Links to look at related to this blog
Spatialworlds blog

Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
ACARA website

ACARA Australian Curriculum portal


Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au 


A green light for implementation
After 4 years and 6 months of meetings, advisory groups, writing panels, draft documents, consultation periods, teacher forums and robust discussions, the Australian Curriculum: Geography is published. On Friday, 10 May 2013 the Ministers of Education met and signed-off on the final document and on the 20 May 2013 the geography curriculum went live on the ACARA site.
The Australian Geography Teachers Association (AGTA) and geography teachers in Australia started working towards the creation of the curriculum when AGTA, the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland (RGSQ) established the 'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project way back in October 2008. Since then there has been 4 advisory panels and over 10 writers who have crafted the many iterations of the curriculum leading to this final document. The publication of the curriculum is a very important day for geography in Australia because for the first time we have a geography curriculum for all of Australia - a 21st Century curriculum deserving plaudits as a world class geography curriculum. To view the curriculum go to the ACARA Australian Curriculum Portal at http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/Geography/Rationale. The published on-line curriculum can be filtered and downloaded as required.
The next important event is the publication on 30 May of the ESA resources (GeogSpace) to support the Australian Curriculum: Geography. As mentioned in a previous Spatialworlds posting, the GeogSpace resource has been developed by AGTA and will be on-line as a standalone website called GeogSpace. We expect this resource to go live by the end of May and be the perfect support for classroom teachers engaging with the new geography Curriculum. More on that when it is launched. In the meantime keep an eye out for the GeogSpace link coming alive (http://www.geogspace.edu.au)
So at last the planets are lining up for the implementation of a national geography Curriculum. The next step is for geography teachers around Australia to offer professional learning for our teaching colleagues who are not geographers and require support in teaching this new discipline based conceptual geography curriculum - to help these teachers to think geographically. It is an exciting time for geography in Australia schools. 

To get the ball rolling I conducted a workshop for DECD implementation officers on Wednesday 22 May at Thebarton Senior College. 

Click here to download an edited version of last night's presentation.



Friday, May 17, 2013

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Primary teachers workshop on 7 May



Image above: Rice fields somewhere in China. Colours, patterns and questions - the joy of thinking and seeing geographically.


Links to look at related to this blog
Spatialworlds blog

Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
ACARA website
ACARA Australian Curriculum portal

 

Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au 



* On 7 May a group of primary teachers gathered at Ballyana Conference Centre in Adelaide to spend time deconstructing the Australian Curriculum: Geography for primary students (and teachers).  
* Michelle Fulton from Global Education presented the global perspective at the workshop. Click here to view Michelle's Powerpoint presentation.

* The presentation from John Butler on the primary school GeogSpace resources can be downloaded here.

* Before the next session on technology and skills in geography, either download one of the GIS programs on the CD titled 'Free GIS software to get started' or download from the Internet the free GIS program called QGIS at
http://quantum-gis.en.softonic.com/download  


* To follow-up the work on the day have a close look at the following Spatialworlds entries recently posted.

* Geoinformation galore

* Pure Glat

 * Geography play

* Spatial sharing

* Just geography  

* Just really interesting

 * Dabbling in free spatial technology

* The WOW factor of geography

* More than trees and capes: Cultural Geography


*** ...and from the past on primary geography 




* Using Scoop.it to scoop spatial technology

Over the past month I have been using Scoop.it website for my students to research their geographical issues. I continue to be impressed by the potential of this great site to gather sites of interest - many of which I would never have come across by a normal Google search. For quite some time I have been a fan of Dr Seth Dixon's Geographical Education Scoop.it. His Scoop.it continues to feed me some great information and sites every day via an email.

My four Scoop.it topics are Spatial education and technology, Spatial literacy, Geographical thinking and Hisgeography. I am getting some great feeds (blogs, Instagrams, Twitter feeds, Facebook links and the normal Internet sites) through the Suggested content facility of the Scoop.it site which is fed through to my topics each day. As well as the automatic Suggested content that appears for review on a daily basis (to bin or scoop), one can add Posts manually to the topic when anything else is found on the Internet of interest to the topic.
As time goes I hope that these Scoop.it topics will grow into really useful curated sites as an adjunct to the Spatialworlds blog. I highly recommend Scoop.it as a tool for curating and harvesting sites on whatever takes ones fancy. Feel free to follow my two Scoop.it topics at:
http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-education-and-technology
http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-literacy
http://www.scoop.it/t/geographical-thinking
http://www.scoop.it/t/hisgeography