Gapminder and animated statistics

The Gapminder animated graph is fantatstic teaching and learning tool for upper school Human Geography students. It's interactive and students can use it to show changes in a huge number of variables across varied timescales. Countries are represented as bubbles, colour coded by continent and diametrically proportioaten to total population.

The website includes tutorials, teaching resources and a series of videos in which the incredibly entertaining Hans Rosling narrates the animated statistics. Wonderful stuff.

Hans Rosling demonstrates the tool in this video from TED:

And he's only half joking

Some year 13 tutees enjoyed this and we had a laugh. A chat in tutorial revealed that they felt somewhat patronised by teachers "rattling on" about how privelaged they should feel to have gone through their formative years with unprecedented access to the information and how quickly the world is changing and if they don't show curiosity for digital developments they will be left behind etc etc etc.

GIS as revision tool

I created this map as a revision aid for year 12 AS srudents - Geopolitics of Energy. The idea came out of a discussion with students about the importance of organisational skills. A common issue was the studets' ability to remember case study information, including location, relevance and scale. An interesting discussion followed about the emphasis we put on specific case studies as students were left feeling that case studies showed them unique processes and places rather than the real intention of contextualising Global processes. The map attempts to package a complicated case study of Geopolitics in Energy.


View The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline in a larger map

Urban Earth Rural Earth

Inspired by the very cool Urban Earth walkthroughs of various world cities, I set out to portray rural France in the same way. The route is provided as a Google Map below. Not exactly Mumbai, but it was fun to do and could be done as a project with students to engage them and bring the concept of "place" to their lived experience.

Rural Earth Walkthru - Fauconnieres "chez my mother-in-law" from Bobby Walker on Vimeo.

View Rural Earth Walkthru in Fauconnieres in a larger map

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Satire in geography

We're just tying up a unit of work with year 7 on globalisation in the context of the fashion industry. A large focus has been on sweatshop conditions and how the low wages and long working hours allow companies to keep prices down in MEDCs. I'm wondering if this video would be appropriate for year 7 students:



As always with "The Onion", there is a satirical, almost cynical slant on their reports - is this accessible in year 7? Are 11 year-olds ready for this kind of twist on the values we try to instill?

Urban Earth City Walkthrus

Those Geo-warriors at Urban Earth have been doing something very interesting. Take a walk through a city, stop every 8 paces and take a digital photograph. Put them together to take a virtual walk across Mumbai, Mexico City, London, Bristol or Guadalajara.

Here is Mumbai in around 10 minutes: