HotRock presentations on Slideshare

I've been uploading some of our presentations onto slideshare.  I hope that it might make it easier for many of you to find and you can use them through this or download them.  They are of course still available to download on our website www.thehotrock.org.au.  Here's one of them.  We use it to start of our Climate change module - Global Warming, Global Warning.   1. what is climate change quiz

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Climate Change Information for 3BGEO & Science

I've come across a great resource which would be perfect for use within unit 3B Geography.  It's a booklet called The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.  Its written by the Australian Academy of Science, which also means that lots of the statistics and impacts are focussed on Australia too.

Its very readable, whilst also being informative and discusses the answers to 7 key climate change questions:

1. What is Climate Change?
2. How has the Earth's climate changed in the distant past?
3. How has the Earth's climate changed in the recent past?
4. Are human activities causing climate change?
5. How do we expect climate to evolve in the future?
6. What are the consequences of Climate Change?
7. How do we deal with the uncertainty in the science?

Its really perfect for the 1st few lessons of 3b Gegraphy on climate change and would be useful in science too.  Lucy

Climate Change Graffiti

We've got another new module up on the website.  YEY!  Climate Change Graffiti is an upper school art module developed by Anna Henshall who has developed a couple of other great art modules for us already...... Design for the Future & Painting Australia's Natural Habitat.

This one, as the title suggests, gets studetns to create a graffiti artwork that gets across the message about climate change and encourages people to change and act to stop climate change.  I think I would have really enjoyed doing this one at school.  I always like editing the Art ones as I learn loads of things myslef and get really inspired.  I hope that some schools take this on and allow their studetns to brighten up some boring school walls with an important message.

The module also gets them to look at the work of local Perth Graffiti artist Stormie Mills and I felt particularly cultured when I came across these in a car park in Subiaco last time I was up in Perth as I knew they were by Stormie.  They're pretty affecting too I'm sure you'll agree.  He looks at beauty in decay and people's resilience even when things don't seem to be going well.

In the module students analyse how he gets his message across and then think about how they will communicate theirs and develop their own style.

Grab your spray cans now!  (but of course make sure its legal to paint where you plan!!)

Lucy

Fun and Inspiration at the Weekend

David and Skye in Action. Skye liked the dancing book.

Ingrid spreads the word. Giving away packets of coriander seeds hleped too.

We had a fantastic weekend at the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta. Ingrid and I shared duties on our stand over the weekend, David and Skye helped me out ;) and Tundi (?), Ingrid's daughter had organised a fashion remodelling/recycling area futher up the street and had made herself a great outfit. Maybe Ingrid can post a photo?

I really enjoyed hearing how enthusiastic people were about what we are doing with Schools. You would hope they would be at a Sustainability fiesta but nonetheless people were eager to talk to us and very encouraging.  Our coriander seeds ran out and the leaflet stock was depleted. We got quite a few names on our living library list too. This is a new idea which I hope we will develop over the next few months so thank you to those that signed up, I'll be writing more to you soon.

So many people there doing great work. Shani and Tim of course for organising it all, opening their house and accomodation at the Painted Fish and generally getting people in their community on board.

Its down that way, no up that way! So many things going on it was hard to keep track.

I had some good conversations with Helen and Tim at Sustainable Energy Now. I'm impressed by their campaigning. Some good stats in their brochure....did you know that if just a quarter of homes currently supplied by synergy got a 1.5kw solar system this creates as much energy as the current coal fired power genration in WA. The friendly people at Fern community gardens opposite also signed up to our living library.

I loved the 'recycled' bikes. I've got a groovy rusty blue retro one myslef and was pretty inspired to try turning it into one that I could carry Skye in. Here's a just one of the many creations.

Guerrilla gardening was in evidence. Not sure if the chickens stay out on the verge all the time but the vegetables in the verge looked (and hopefully taste) great. So sculptural.
















I and many other people I noticed brought a rug from carpetsforcommunities.org.  Great little rugs made from recyled t shirt off cuts by women in Cambodia and all profits go directly to them. The stand was run by volunteers. I even got a photo of my rug being made. Its now cheering up our bathroom. If you're going to buy things then I can't think of a better type of enterprise to buy them from.

Loads of stuff for kids, the HotRockers to be; fairy gardens, exercise bikes to generate electricity with, music, costumes. I was really impressed by the model sustainable houses built by Year 6s. We've got a similar model building exercise as the finale to our Global Warming:Global Warning module (see the lesson 'What's the plan?). Its for slightly older students and I have to say I think its a great learning activity at any age. Really creative, allows them to express their ideas and its hands on and practical, makes a change from writing it all up in an essay.

Students from some of our schools were picking out their friends in our photos and other people were happy to find out what their old school was doing for sustainability.

I could go on and on. Can't wait till next year. I'll leave you with my favourite costume.

Graphs students can get excited about.

Yes really!!!

Have a look at Hans Rosling's Gapminder World. The link goes to a cgraph about CO2 emissions form 1820. It shows all the countries, how their level of emissions per person changed over time, diff colours for diff. continents and the size of the circle is overall emissions. You can click on each circle to see which country or select different countrires to look at their trajectory. Income per person is on the x axis.

• Where does Australia end up?
• What happens to China and India after about 1980?
• Which country led the way with emissions?
• Whats the correlation between wealth and emissions?
• When did the US become the biggest producer per person? Why did the figure fall in the 1930s?

Or watch the overall emissions on a map for a really stark vision of where the emissions are coming form.

You can project it at full screen, pause it at different points or back track by draggin, hover over circles to find out who it is. You can choose different cgraphs for all sorts of global measures. All UN statistics.

The picture above is just a screen grab, the interactive is so so so much better.

Blogs

I have been finding myself using blogs more and more for inspiration, to find out what teachers are doing, to get an idea of feelings on different topics etc. I get ideas from them and they invariably lead me on to other places and sites where I get more ideas. You've got to stop somewhere but when you are a bit short of insporation I find them really great. Its really why I decided to start to write one aswell, to try to give you a bit of inspiration or the lead to set you off on the path to discovering new things for you.

Here's the train of thoughts/pages that I went along when reasearching for some lessons on climate change, MEDC vs LEDC attitudes and Kyoto. I think I started by search for Climate change Developing Countries Adaptations. This is what I found:

From Power to Poverty is a blog by the UK Oxfam research manager covering lots of aspects of aidwork. He had written a post about how african nations were acting to adapt to climate change. I then searched for other posts of his about cliamte change, from the comments I linbked to another website debating the effects of being sustainable in the North on the South from the IIED. This then led me on to a documentary on Copenhagen from the point of view of developing nations, really interesting.

So much better than all the dry stuff I was getting from official websites which was making me fall asleep and not really telling me what the issues really were (well probably they were but I was bored by then so imaging how bored your studetns might be if they had to read this). I was thinking it would be great to be able to direct students to blogs about the topics they are studying. They can see what views real people have, look at different sides of the arguement and could even engage in it themselves by leaving comments on a blog.

They could start their own class blog if they wanted, give their opinions about what they are studying, post some of their work, see what other people had to say about it. For a blog with loads of ideas about how to use social media in you teaching check out http://daviderogers.blogspot.com/ he's really innovating with it in his lessons, using twitter, facebook, shaerd files etc.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration to go off searching for yourself. It certainly got me reinspired.

Climate Cartoon

I was looking for cartoons to illustrate some lessons I am doing on climate change. This one made me laugh and summed up really what we believe here. Whatever you think about climate change the move to more sustainable living has so many benefits in so many areas. Why wouldn't you want to try?

The Population Puzzle

I watched Dick Smith's population puzzle last night hoping that would address some issues of sustainability. Personally I found it quite a dissapointing program in terms of balance and really examining the complexity of the issues but its definitely one that could help spark debate, and indeed the debate after was better.

It all seemed a bit reductionist and very 'conservative'. Dick seemed to want to maintain things as they are. Well ok but even so things are not really ok as they are.

He argued that slower population growth would stop areas of land on city outskirts being concreted over and high rise developments. He argued that we did not want to become like Bangladesh. Well there is some way to go to get to that population, they certainly don't have a problem with lack of water but I would strongly argue that their poverty is not due to overpopulation but to their history. On top of that the environmental impact/carbon footprint of each individual person in Bangladesh is a tiny fraction of an Australian's.

Dick seems to want Australia to stay as it is so that we can continue to consume as we are. He did not talk about reducing our consumption, using less water and energy, living more densley in cities rather than continuously exanding in 1/4 acre blocks (they're an accident of history), sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. At my level of consumption I need about 2.3 planets, way too much but probably not as much as some. That's what we need to change. He certainly did not talk about changing his lifestyle. Yes population adds to the problem but if all the world consumed like Bangladeshis there would not be a climate change problem (although the poverty would lead to other envirnmental problems).
We consume too much and if we want to preserve the Australian (and world) environment it cannot continue. Population is one part of the problem but to only look at this totally ignores the enormous complexity of the issue. Increased population does not correlate directly with ruining the environment or decreasing quality of life. This assumes that what we have now is the right way, that this is the best quality of life we can have. Its not, it needs radical ethinking.

Living in a high density city, with areas with a sense of community, where you can walk to work, walk to the shops, know your neighbours (as you don't just get straight into your car), have easily acdessible countryside (as its not covered in suburbs), have hostpitals, libraries, leisure centres etc all close by could well be a better quality of life than living in a suburb with not real centre where you have to drive to the city centre for work, drive to the shops etc. And it is certainly better for the environment .

I could go on and on.

As you can see a great film to start a debate. This is the website for the population puzzle . It has lots of stats and links to other sites. The opinions page is also good with different points of view, good for getting a class debate going. I like comments by Amanda Mackenzie of Australian Youth Climate Coalition. And this is the Q and A website where you can download the program and look at the transcript. I'm with Suvendrini Perera, and there are also good points about the regions and immigration in general. Also global connections, our global responsibility vs responsibility to our own citizens.

Lots to think about over the weekend, Lucy

EDIT - Well I thought a bit more about this over the weekend. What it really highlighted was that we need a plan. I personally think its impossible to say what a sustainable population is as it depends upon how sustainably they live - if they reduce consuption and change agricultural practices etc. it will be much higher than if not BUT if Australia's population will increase (as it will) it needs to planned for. Where will they live, how will they live, how will they be supported, what policies would encourage more sustainble living, what import, export, agricultural policies, planning and trasport policies do we need to make this sustainable? If there is no plan and we don't think about the Austrlia that we want then we can't work towards achieving it.

I think our lesson 'Our Future' in The Big CONsumption gets students considering this. They envisage the future that they want here and then plan a series of steps in different aspects of life to achieve that. Maybe they can help the government with this?? Its a very different approach to to just looking at what is and then projecting the numbers out and working out how to cater for that, which is I think the main point Dick Smith was trying to make.

Lucy

Geography Modules

The Rogal Geographical Society has developed lots of full modules for geography teaching in secondary schools. Lots of these cover themes of sustainability...

• You are what you eat

• Changing Climates

• The Geography of my stuff

You can download resources separately or the whole module can be downloaded in a zip file. Loads of other subjects on there too. KS3 is for years 7, 8 & 9, KS4-5 is for yrs 10,11 & 12.

Geog away, Lucy

Surfing and Sea Level Rise

This resource allows your students to explore what impact sea level rise due to climate change would have on Sufing on the gold coast. It also makes good use of GIS with Google earth being used to model this. www.juicygeography.co.uk/sealevel.htm.

Have a look round Juicy Geography site, its a blog by geography teacher Noel Jenkins, sharing lots of free resources, he also writes Digital Geography . There are other great google earth resources, sustainability, geography resources like the wind farm location decision making exercise. This explains how students can use google earth to find a suitable windfarm location in their local area gives the criteria they can use to assess it. Students create their own placemarks and can then save them to a shared folder for peer assessment.

Happy Googling, Lucy

Geography and Oil Spills

This is going to be a week focussed on geography resources for lots of reasons really. Richard is off to Sydney for 3 days to look into setting up HotRock over in the Eastern States bringing our sustainability Education to even more Australians. Yey. So that travelling is a bit of geography. He's flying but offsetting his carbon, although we can't understand how Quantas can do this for only $12. It seems too cheap, do they plant trees somewhere with very cheap labour??? If you know how this can work let us know.

Then he's talking at the Georaphical Association of Western Australia conference on Sunday (back in Perth), so these reosurces and ideas are for you guys at his workshop.

They're also for me as I'm a geographer so I always get excited about geography stuff.

So first off in a fit of patriotism, let me direct you to the Geographical Association of the UK, which I was a member of before I came over to Oz. A pretty cool association with loads going on and a great website that I often make use of. www.geography.org.uk There's often topical and useful stuff. I like the Think Pieces for helping me with my curriculum development and planning and also the resources section.

A great page up at the moment gives loads of ideas about how to use the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in your teaching. This great quote from Barack Obama starts it off:

'We (Americans) consume more than 20 per cent of the world's oil, but have less than two per cent of the world's oil reserves. And that's part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean because we're running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.'

- President Barack Obama, 15 June 2010

The page then gives loads of inspirational teaching ideas. Our Peak Oil module also ties in perfectly with this subject, helping students explore why the days of cheap oil are over and how we can adapt to a world with out it

This topic combines sustainability and geography on so many levels. What do we use that contains oil? How are we connected to others around the world by oil? How can we change our communities to live without oil?

I liked this one where you can move the oil spill to anywhere in the World. www.ifitwasmyhome.com/ I put it over Dunsborough where I live and it covers the whole of the cape and up to Mandurah. Quite a powerful image if you're worried about oil exploration off the coast of the SW. Here's the map it creates...

4 degrees of Warming - Google Earth Climate Change Map

I was downloading forms so that I could apply for Skye's passport when I came across this google earth interactive map showing the possible effects around the world of 4 degrees of warming. There are facts and videos about the different effects, ranging from the hottest temperatures in Europe increasing by 8 degrees celcius, to increased risk of forest fire in southern Australia to 150m people a year more being flooded by 2075 due to sea level rise.

A great resource for Geographers to get students to do their own research into the effects of climate change. It could also be used in our module Global Warming, Global Warning. In particular in the 'What are the Consequences?' lesson.

Down load the KML file from the fco website using the link above. Enjoy the weekend, Lucy

Sustainability starters - great vids

Here are some great sustainability starter videos produced by ANZ and IBM. They cover smarter water, energy, transport and cities. They're Australian too!









I came across them on Richard Allaway's site www.geogalot.com. He has a fantastic resources site for geography teachers www.geographyalltheway.com. He teaches IB but the resources cover most geography topics. Its now a subscription site but well worth it.

Enjoy the vidoes and have a good weekend. Lucy

Science sustainability resources from UPD8

UPD8 is a great website. Its got loads of curriculum and resources for science, and the lessons are really inoovative covering the usual topics in absorbing ways. I just looked at one where pupils were given the task of coordinating a car chase stunt for a hollywood movie, enabling them to learn about the relationship between speed, distance and time and inter and extraploation of graphs. On a specifically sustainability slant.....

They also have a series of lessons called climate futures. These cover energy use - which is the best present to give mum for her birthday?, eco-friendly motorbikes - write a review for a magazine, food recycling etc. You have to register to download the resources but these ones and lots of others on the site are free.

Lucy

Climate Change and Art

This is a picture of a 'Climate Refugee Camp' an art installation by hermann josef hack.

This is another idea which could be used in Society and Environment to start thinking about the effects of climate change and in Art as inspiration for students to create their own works to raise awareness of and encourage people to act to prevent climate change .

• Why might we get climate refugees?

• What does Being a refugee mean?
• Why has he done this in a main square of Berlin?
• What message is he trying to get across?

Lucy