Category: Alan Parkinson
New publication: Teaching media literacy and the geographies of consumption
How can encouraging students to cut up, rearrange and otherwise mess with adverts’ imagery and messages help them to better appreciate the complex geographies of consumption and international trade? How can the teaching of controversial issues build on students’ senses of injustice, mischief and creativity? We have a suggestion…
Earlier this year, a booklet called Medialukutaitoa vastamainoksista became a booklet called Teaching media literacy and the geographies of consumption. These booklets come from a series of workshops developed by former followthethings.com intern Eeva Kempainnen in a variety of educational settings in Finland. The hands-on and entertaining methods she sets out are suitable for a variety of ages, and the booklets are crammed with ‘how to’ advice and excellent examples of student work. Watch our cheaply produced promo, download the booklets by clicking the links, and find out more about Eeva’s work here.
Thanks to Mary Biddulph and Alan Parkinson for their help in this process.
More classroom resources to teach with followthethings.com
Today, we share two new classroom resources, developed with Alan Parkinson this summer. They have been developed primarily for school teachers in England and Wales (many of who share a new National Curriculum). BUT, they are also written for anyone, anywhere who is keen to teach and learn with followthething.com!
The first is a 9 page Teachers’ Guide to the Follow The Things Website. It’s a .pdf comic ‘guide to using the website in (& out of) the classroom’ with ‘lesson ideas and guidance for Key Stages 1-5’. It will also be of interest to anyone who hasn’t come across our website before and wants a quick tour. Click the button to download. We hope you enjoy it.
The second is a 4 page guide based on a wonderful set of Royal Geographic Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) teaching resources called Where does my stuff come from? These used some of the ‘follow the things’ work that we did before followthethings.com opened. This guide updates these resources, suggesting how our website and other resources can help to answer this question in vivid and up-to-date ways. It’s a Word file, too, for cut-&-pasting…
These resources are part of a larger Classroom Project which – by the end of the summer – will see two new pages for teachers added to our main website, and the documentation of a ‘follow the teachers’ project (see below). We look forward to hearing how these resources work in practice. We welcome comments (on this post), emails (to fttclassroom@yahoo.com) and tweets (@followthethings).
followthethings.com and the National Curriculum
This summer, we have been working with Alan Parkinson – legendary Geography teacher, ‘Living Geography‘ blogger and GeoBlogs tweeter – to develop some new pages and downloads for school teachers and their students. Our site has been open for almost two years, and we have found that these ‘shoppers’ are (among) our most enthusiastic. But we’ve also had feedback from some saying that it’s difficult to know where to start with our site: guidance and teacher-generated ideas were needed.
Today, we publish the first completed resource from our work together – a guide to how Geography teachers in England and Wales can use our site in the light of changing National Curriculum requirements. This document will, we are sure, be helpful for many other teachers across disciplines, in different kinds of schools, and in many countries.
This is where we’re publishing it first. You can download it by pressing the button below. We’ll update it as the Curriculum develops. [We made up the NC logo].
This, along with many other resources, will be published on followthethings.com later in the summer. As soon as each on is finished, however, we’ll publish it here!
Please send us any feedback and ideas by commenting on this post or emailing us on fttclassroom@yahoo.com And, if you have already been teaching with followthethings.com, we would love to see how! Please get in touch and join our ﹟followtheteachers project on twitter (see below).
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