Geography Resources Policy



KS3 geography learning environment

Planning the teaching and learning resources for your department

Note: this is a draft document

Contents Page

Introduction 2

1. General Approaches 3

i) First principles (quality, quantity and balance) 3

ii) Getting started 3

iii) Building your knowledge base 4

iv) Evaluation of the resource ecology 4

v) Identify a reasonable planning period 5

vi) Don’t ask…. don’t get! 5

vii) Whole school policy 5

viii) Time management 6

ICT resources: strategies 7

Why use ICT? 7

Planning your ICT strategy 8

i) Elearning credits 8

ii) ICT: Hardware

iii) ICT: Training & ICT support 8

iv) ICT: Admin support 9

v) ICT: online resources 9

vi) ICT: Intranet 9

vii) ICT: Software 9

viii) ICT: Audio Visual 10

ix) ICT is growing fast 10

3. Other resources: strategies 11

i) Textbooks 11

ii) Atlases & Globes 11

iii) Maps 12

iv) Field Equipment 12

v) Field Courses 12

vi) Hardware models 12

vii) Freebies 13

Conclusion: A Resource Ecology 13

Introduction

This guidance is aimed at helping you to develop strategies and a vision for the teaching and learning resources in your department. These resources will change and grow continually, but this is an inevitable and healthy part of the ‘learning environment’ of the geography department.

The idea of resources being part of the learning ‘ecosystem’ means we can analyse them ecologically. That is, we can make professional judgements in terms of:

• Quality (e.g. what kinds of resources can we provide?)

• Quantity (e.g. what numbers/access can we provide?)

• Balance (e.g. what is an appropriate balance between printed and electronic materials?)

• Role (e.g. what purposes do different kinds of resources perform?)

• Use (e.g. how are various resources best used by teachers and students?)

There is no standard formula that provides the answer to such questions. See ‘Using Geography Textbooks’

This guidance is designed to help you and your team sort out your strategy and vision, in relation to quality, quantity and balance of learning materials that your purchase - in the context of their purpose and the use you and the students will make of them. You will find constant return to two important questions that should be applied to all decisions on teaching and learning resources:

• Does it represent value for money? What return can we expect from this investment?

• What educational purposes are served by this resource? Why do we need it?

The fundamental challenge – the deployment of scarce funds

'I've only got enough money for one set of textbooks!'

‘What’s the point of using my e-learning credits – I can rarely get to the computer room so it doesn’t seem worth it’.

The perennial problem for most Heads of Geography is how to spend a tight budget when funds are scarce. Textbooks, ICT, field trips, field equipment, posters, atlases, globes … there is never enough for everything. However, with some care, the budget can go further than you might hope.

These guidelines, which may help you achieve this, are divided into three sections:

1. General approaches

2. ICT resources: strategies

3. Other resources: strategies

A big issue for classroom expenditure is deciding what balance to strike between the traditional print materials such as textbooks and new digital resources that require computers and other hardware.

1. General Approaches

i) First principles (quality, quantity and balance)

• Will electronic materials eventually replace books? Should we just forget about textbooks?

• No. There is much chance of this happening as radio ‘replacing’ newspapers or TV ‘replacing’ radio. More choices result, however, requiring careful decision-making, which must take into account value for money and fitness for (educational) purpose.

• Can I just concentrate on books?

• No. Geography in schools (and especially the GA) has always rightly embraced technologies that help bring the world into the classroom and help students enquire intelligently about the world. Geography, probably more than most subjects, needs multi-modal information for teaching and learning: pictures, text, charts, moving images, figures, graphs, maps … and ICTs can help make this available to teachers and pupils

• So what is the ‘correct’ balance between books and ICTs?

• There is no clear-cut answer to this question. Think of the classroom as a learning environment or an ecosystem (link - introduction). The issue is about what balance is appropriate to strike in your particular circumstances – of staff, students, ICT infrastructure, whole school policies/initiatives – and the educational priorities identified by your department.

Like all ecosystems, the classroom ecosystem is dynamic, fragile, interconnected and multidimensional – complicated but best understood as a whole. Resources play a crucial part, not least in providing a key energy input. But their impact can only be understood in relation to the whole ‘ecosystem’

ii) Getting started

• Don’t be panicked into over hasty ‘fire-fighting’ type decisions (which may be inefficient and lead to later regrets)

• Do adopt a strategy driven by educational priorities and purposes and governed by the notion of ‘value for money’.

• Do develop a clear vision of how you want your classroom ‘resource ecology’ to look and operate, and begin to work toward it. Of course you have to start from where you are at, hence the need to evaluate

• Do think across the department – and involve the whole teaching team

• Don’t forget to include the perspective of the learner. What is the students’ experience of geography? How can this be enhanced by an improved deployment of resources?

iii) Building your knowledge base

The internal environment

Do you know what your per capita allocation is?

Do you know what expenditure this figure is meant to cover?

Do you know whether there are additional pots – for computers, field trips, for special items such a interactive whiteboards etc

• Do you know what the procedure is for obtaining additional funds – do you have to bid? If so when, and how and to whom?

The external environment

Do you know what the average per capita spend is on geography in state schools?

According to the GA .uk the spend on geography books in state schools is around £2.00 per pupil per year.

Do you know what it is in fee-paying schools? – it is considerably more than this!

Do you know what various national bodies and lobby groups recommend?

According the Book Trust a reasonable figure would be £6.00 per pupils per year in secondary schools – on geography textbooks.

• Do you know the level of e-learning credits (ELCs) you and your team is entitled to? Do you know what you can spend them on, and how, and by when? Visit .uk to search for resources that can be purchased using ELCs.

• Are you aware of any benchmarks or guidelines on ICT hardware – access to computers, classroom data projectors, and interactive whiteboards? (advice and links to information about interactive whiteboards is available from BECTA

The total policy environment

What do policy makers say about teaching and learning resources

National level – see for example the e-learning strategy .uk/elearningstrategy . Find out what OFSTED have to say about geography at KS3. QCA’s annual monitoring reports also make general points about the geography national curriculum in terms of how it is implemented by teachers and experienced by students

LEA level – there may be advice for schools available from your LEA

How transparently are resources allocated?

How much guidance is offered to schools on how to manage financial resources? Some websites which offer guidance include:

iv) Evaluation of the resource ecology

If one does not exist already, compile an inventory of resources used in KS3 geography. This may take the following form:

Resource Numbers Relevant module(s)/topic(s)

This inventory can be used as the main data with which to address questions such as these:

• Students

o What do the students experience?

▪ Over the key stage

▪ In each year

o What do students like/ not like about resources they use?

• Teachers

• How well do the resources work for the teaching team?

▪ Are they easily managed?

▪ Are they enjoyable and stimulating to use?

• Balance

▪ What is the role, or contribution, of each resource – what does each ‘bring to the table’

▪ What is there because it works well?

▪ What is there because no one has changed it?

v) Identify a reasonable planning period

This may be governed in part by the ‘shelf-life’ of the resources you use: what is the life span of a textbook? Of video tapes? Of computer equipment? Of various forms of software?

Let’s say 3 years is a reasonable planning period.

• £5,000 a year may seem a like a tight budget for a large school, but to anticipate £15,000 over 3 years seems a lot better.

• Make a three year plan for resourcing the department and set different priorities for spending each year

• Try to spend more on resources that will pay back over a longer period (such as ICT) than those which need replacing each year and indeed which may result in low ‘bangs for bucks’ (such as some photocopying)

• Spend some time planning how to ensure that resources survive longer, such as investing in plastic covers for textbooks and a set routine, known and understood by the pupils, for secure storage of valuable things like interactive whiteboard pens, and consumables such as pens and other daily equipment.

vi) Don’t ask….don’t get!

• Make sure you ask for what you want. Don’t just accept the historical position of Geography: put in a bid with strong educational justification emphasising impact and pay back, and you may be rewarded. If nothing else it does no harm for the profile of the subject with the senior management team

• All requests, but particularly special requests are stronger when placed into the context of a strategic plan (over say three years).

• spend the budget, if you don’t it may go back into the general pot, and your budget may be cut for the next year.

vii) Whole school policy

• Involve senior management in your plans

• There may be whole school funds for infrastructure such as ICT hardware, and there may also be special funds of which you are not aware, perhaps for fieldtrips. If the department is innovating in an area that the school sets as a priority, it may be possible to allocate extra funding.

This is why it is helpful to link resource expenditure to educational priorities and value for money. It may help for the department to position itself as an engine leading aspects of change identified within the school’s development plan.

• It may also be important to be clear on the school’s approach to levels that students can be expected to contribute to costs. Some schools and colleges may ‘ask’ students for a set contribution toward a field trip for example, or ‘strongly recommend’ the purchase of a key text book. Others may deem this unacceptable.

• Is there a school intranet on which web links and additional materials can be offered to students to augment particular topics – particularly extension materials for students who can take things further or who can be stretched.

viii) Time management

Geographers have been found, in inspections, to be remarkably innovative in producing new resources, but consider the time cost of producing your own resources….time is perhaps your most scarce resource.

• A teacher earning £30,000 could value his/her time at £1.50 for five minutes

• Consider therefore the best way to ‘spend’ this time. Are you, for example, reinventing the wheel?

• A few hours spent as a team investigating available resources once or twice a year, could save time rushing to put resources together (and the time honoured stress caused by last minute photocopying).

o This could include downloading PowerPoint presentations and other materials identified using advanced search facilities.

o It could also include identifying free print materials – still available from various sources such as NGOs, certain companies and the travel industry.

• Many departments operate well as teams, with lessons resourced with joint plans and materials, including worksheets etc. Look into the possibility of pooling these materials digitally (rather than dispersed on different hard drives and laptops). Maybe start with a core of common self-standing homeworks (that can also be posted on the intranet for students).

ICT resources: strategies

Why use ICT?

The OFSTED report ‘ICT in schools effect of government initiatives’ 2002

.uk/publications is illuminating. ICT does not guarantee improvements in teaching and learning, indeed it can make things worse if not carefully managed. However, there are ways according to OFSTED evidence in which ICT add value

There has been, and perhaps always will be, a steep learning curve for ICT use in Geography. It is easy to spend a lot of money on ICTs, but so long as the twin questions concerning educational purpose/benefits and value for money remain unclear, this is something that many would wish to avoid. It may seem too risky. On the other hand, the risks associated with NOT investing in ICTs could be substantial. Can school geography afford not to embrace GIS (geographic information systems) – see for example the RGS advice

Thus, planning a stepped strategy, complete with risk analysis, is important…again the three-year plan approach makes sense.

There are two reasons for using ICT:

• Teaching and learning activities are enhanced

• General organisation (of teacher and pupil) is improved

The second point, general organisation, is easy to overlook…you might think something can be just as easily handwritten as word processed for example, but you may decide there is a feel good factor with well produced materials, for teacher and pupil, that it is motivational (as the OFSTED report identifies). Furthermore, digitised data can be easily stored, revisited and updated and they do not fade or become tattered. High quality projected images stay clear and sharp. The head of department’s job involves organisation – and indeed, data handling - ICT can be a real help in this.

For teaching and learning, ICT should add something. It is worth asking yourself some questions. As a result of using ICT, are the pupils:

• Getting quicker, easier access to the right information?

• Thinking more about the geography?

• Thinking less about getting over technical hitches (that aren’t linked to geography)?

• Spending less time on mundane tasks, and more on higher level ones?

And, as a result of using ICT, are you and the geography teaching team:

• Thinking more about teaching and learning geography?

• Spending less time on administration & technical issues?

Having said this, a long-term view is needed. In the short term, time will inevitably need to be invested in getting systems working and training needs met. Sources of help:

• click on to the GA’s Professional Development Unit (PDU) programme for courses on GIS for example, and classroom use of ICTs)

• Consult the new GA Handbooks (coming spring 2004) and other publications (see .uk)

There are many sources for beginners - of simple examples of how ICT can improve teaching geography. A simple example is that of using a graph. Pupils learn how to use an excel spreadsheet to draw graphs. Instead of drawing graph by hand they make the computer do it. Thus, more of the lesson is spent discussing the graph (the geography) than ‘doing the graph’.

Practical examples can be found on the QCA Innovating with Geography website

Planning your ICT strategy

i) Elearning credits

Elearning credits are still not fully used by some departments. The system gives schools access to the education materials produced by commercial suppliers. Information is available at .uk The products available with elearning credits are reviewed by ‘teachers evaluating educational multimedia’ .uk . This has the value of impartial reviews.

ii) ICT: Hardware

• Don’t forget that ICT is high on the government’s education agenda

• There is money available and it doesn’t all have to come out of the department budget

• Speak to the senior management team about planned investment (especially in hardware, like interactive whiteboards)

• Consider leasing equipment e.g. a data projector from a high street retailer, but of course talk to the SMT first.

• Invest in a digital camera(s); These are relatively cheap and very versatile

• Start with projecting PowerPoint onto a whiteboard (interactive whiteboard may not be essential for your department, yet)

• Make sure you have a good pc (recommend windows & Office XP Professional) that is capable of editing videos (Pinnacle Studio 9 recommended)

• Scanners are good value and can quickly become essential.

• A visualizer is a versatile tool and a great time saver, which could become commonplace in every classroom. It looks like an OHP, but projects whatever is beneath it through the data projector in high quality (i.e. don’t have to put materials onto transparencies or scan them first). They can be seen at samsung.co.uk .

iii) ICT: Training & ICT support

• Take the simple route to training…sitting down with a colleague who can show you what to do, is often better than a manual or online guide

• Make full use of your schools ICT support

• High quality, subject specific, online training is available from , either on its own or in conjunction with the GA. Check the GA’s PDU programme too

iv) ICT: Admin support

• Seek admin support for simple and time-consuming ICT tasks, like scanning

v) ICT: online resources

• An increasing volume of excellent resources is available online. This is a list of the more prominent sites, but advanced searching with Google will enable you to build your own list: keep an organised ‘favourites’ folders and save every good site you find

• .uk Geographical Association

• Royal Geographical Society

• innovating with Geography QCA site

• National Geographic

• free archive material available to download and edit

• a good site to direct you on toward the information you need

• Staffordshire learning net, a pioneering education authority for ICT

• teachers evaluating educational multimedia, a good site for finding suitable resources to buy

Lots of mapping software is available (some free on the web, ) other GIS vary in price ( , aegis from advisory-.uk , memory-map.co.uk and )

• Although not everyone in school is aware of it, almost all secondary schools are part of a national schools network through the regional broadband consortia (RBC). This network provides fast access to free resources (some of which have to be paid for by non-school users) an example is the recently available British Pathe archives. The entire archive of literally million of stills and thousands of movie clips can be downloaded for free and edited into lessons.

vi) ICT: Intranet

Look into starting/ developing a department website on your school intranet

• Post up homeworks, schemes of work up, revision plans, past paper questions, and encourage students to use it regularly

• Post up extension work for ‘gifted and talented’ students

• Post up geography in the news section – older students could do this for the department.

• It’s a good back up for communicating with students (e.g. missed lessons/homework students can go to the website in their own time)

vii) ICT: Software

• Get advice from the school ICT support team

• Microsoft office will probably already be part of the whole school budget

• PowerPoint (part of Microsoft office) is a great tool for geographers, easy to pick up and worth spending some time mastering

• but can be good value

• New software for teaching Geography appears all the time, keep up to date via educational websites such as

o Commercial educational publishers

o NGOs

o LEA advice such as Staffordshire Learning Net .uk

o BECTA .uk

o Geographical Association .uk

o QCA .uk/geography

o Royal Geographical Society

• A good resource for teachers evaluating software independently is .uk

• Remember to spend time in planning as a team how the software will be used for teaching and learning. This planning becomes CPD as you inevitable will learn from each other.

viii) ICT: Audio Visual

• TV screens are too small for classes of 30 – use a data projector and big screen.

• The technology to edit videos and put clips into presentations, and to record discussions and put into presentations is now available. ( has examples of products to do this). As the use of images is central to geography teaching and learning this technology is worth emphasising.

• The impact of videos is greatly increased in this way

• The screen in bigger

• The awkward fast forwarding of the video to the right place in class is removed

• You don’t lose the video (it’s all stored in the computer…in the right place in the presentation)

Sound (discussions of students, or appropriate music) also makes a huge difference to the impact of pictures, how they make the students feel, and so how well they learn.

ix) ICT is growing fast

• A final point to note is that ICT is developing apace and becoming cheaper. The impressive ICT already available will only get better. In fact, the issue is as much our ability to respond to the opportunities ICT presents, as creating new ICTs to meet our needs. The Nesta Future Lab may be interesting to visit in this respect

3. Traditional resources: strategies

This section is to help departmental teams to think about the part played by more traditional, print materials within the context of the whole learning environment. This section is kept shorter than the previous section, not because books and traditional resources are any less important than ICT, but because the more detail on books is available from the GA’s book policy for teaching Geography and the draft paper, ‘Using Geography textbooks’. Links to fieldwork approaches are available by looking at the .uk/geography .

i) Textbooks

The most common resource, used in a plethora of different ways, but how they are to be used is often given insufficient attention.

• Spend some time with the department deciding how you want to use different textbooks

o Classroom use?

o Homework use?

o A source book for activities?

o As a reference for pupils, bringing the threads of the classroom together?

o For the more able/ less able or all pupils?

• Are you sure you have the best textbook for the job?

• Have you investigated the available resources or is inertia/ caution the main reason for your textbook approach?

• Will the book stay relevant?

o Invest more in those which will

o If a textbook is a short-term resource (e.g. very specific to a certain exam course or specification) is it the best investment?

• Think twice before photocopying from the textbook

o Is this happening every week

o Is it really necessary

o Is quality lost to black and white copies

o How much is the copying costing (every year)

o How much time are you spending doing this

• Are students happy if they only see snippets of a textbook?

o The ‘chopped up textbook’ can be irritating for pupils

o Some textbooks are designed to follow a logical development and are better taken as a whole

o Pupils may be wondering what comes before/ after and how this fits into the rest of the book

• Look after textbooks

o invest in copies with plastic covers

o Invest in plastic boxes that protect books being transported from one room to another

More on approaches to using textbooks is available from The GA’S book policy and the draft document ‘Using Geography Textbooks’.

ii) Atlases & Globes

OFSTED have found many departments poorly resourced with too few and inappropriate atlases. Yet atlases have a (relatively) long life span, and are used regularly. Many departments may be (mistakenly) placing atlases too far down the priority list to update them.

• Invest in a set of atlases for lower and upper school

• Invest in a globe, it is remarkable how often you will refer to it, and catch students looking at it

iii) Maps

• Invest in a set of laminated local area maps that you are going to use often

• Remember that you can download maps at a range of scales from the web (e.g. )

• GIS and computerised mapping is developing for easier, more effective classroom use all the time. Keep up to date through sites such as , advisory-.uk , memory-map.co.uk and ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/education/)

iv) Field Equipment

Some field equipment is horribly expensive, but new technology is making it more user friendly

• Consider sharing with the science department (they have more money and technical support) Look to buy more specialised equipment jointly with the science department

• Check what you can do with what you already have at the back of the cupboard, before spending on new equipment

• Consider how often it will be used

• Spend on cheaper, frequently used equipment, like measuring tapes & clipboards

• Consider investing in an automatic weather station (can be linked straight to the classroom computer) Find out more on weather stations at, .

v) Field Courses

Field courses are the highlight of many pupils geography experience, but could take up the entire annual spend.

• Make use of the local environment

• Look at ways of involving the whole school, e.g. a year 10 residential trip could be cross curricular, but have a strong element of geography fieldwork built in

• If asking for a contribution from parents, check to see what school/ local authority funds may be available to support those on income support

More advice on fieldwork is available at .uk/geography. Also visit the Field Studies Council at field-studies-. And try .uk/teachingandlearning/resourcematerials/growingschools/

vi) Hardware models

Many children (and adults) find it helpful to see and touch. In other words, using concrete models and examples can be of great assistance in introducing what may otherwise remain a rather abstract idea – a meander or a plunge pool, contour lines, deposition .- there is a long list of concepts and processes in geography that can be made immediate and ‘real’. You do not necessarily need a full sized wave tank or river flume (though such things exist: eg the Earth Science Centre at the Institute of Education, London which is available for school groups ioe.ac.uk/esc It is amazing what you can do with a watering can, guttering, sand and modelling clay!

For inspiration look up the January 2001 edition of Teaching Geography where Steve Pratchett has an article ‘Investigating cross sections’

You may prefer a hi-tech approach. As long ago as 1996, David Holmes showed how to use ‘Visualisation software: a new aid to learning’ in the July edition of Teaching Geography.

vii) Freebies

Teachers are always alert to resources that can be used for free. You can quite readily obtain class sets of London Tube maps, holiday guides, local town maps. You may be able to get multiple copies of out-of-print road atlases. You can certainly get brochures from Travel shops, really good for examining ‘images’ of places.

The point is that such resources, including train timetables and such like, are authentic, ‘real world’ materials which young people need to be able to decode and use fluently, and critically. Geography classrooms should have such materials as a part of their resource ecology.

NGOs can also be a source of free information (if not materials): click onto .uk for the Development Education Association, the umbrella group for local development education centres and other similar organisations which may be more accessible for a visit than you think.

And don’t forget the main utilities, which do have a public information responsibility – such as Water and Energy companies. They are usually happy to respond to particular requests for assistance.

Of course the biggest ‘freebie’ of them all is the World Wide Web. Using advanced search facilities of search engines such as Google can be very rewarding. Find and bookmark the obvious and regular helpful ‘geography’ sites – starting with Ordnance Survey, Meteorological Office and move to perhaps less obvious ones such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Enjoy upgrading and extending the resource base of your schemes of work, for little more than the cost of your time.

Conclusion: A Resource Ecology

It can be bewildering and frustrating trying to allocate a limited budget to the Geography Department. The good news is, more and better resources are available every year, and ICT means that they can be organised into lessons much more easily.

The department resources will continue to change, and should do so. The head of department cannot buy every available textbook and CD-rom, but by planning it is possible to keep the geography department’s resources alive, changing and growing year on year.

Imagining the classroom as a ‘learning environment’ with a distinctive ecology that needs understanding and supporting (and sometimes protecting) is useful. There is no other subject quite like geography for needing a diverse and dynamic ecology (in order to represent a diverse and dynamic world).

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download