 Okay, thank you. I hope you can hear me, everybody. Thank you for joining me at the end of another teaching day. I guess for many of you. Also, best wishes to anyone joining us from Scotland, where I believe the exam diet has kicked off with the geography exams today for many students. So hopefully all the map skills questions they answered accurately. The title of my session tonight is a bit of a pun. I do like a bit of a pun. Fieldwork being outstanding in your field. A bit like farmers are really outstanding in their fields. And obviously for some young people, when you talk about fieldwork, they literally think you're going to take them to a field. Clearly what we're talking about is learning outside the classroom. And that could be actually within the school building itself. It doesn't have to be in a far remote location. Those of you who perhaps came along to the GA conference a couple of weeks ago now will know that my theme this year has been everyday geographies. It's about looking at the mundane, if you like, the everyday and finding the beauty in the quotidian, the day-to-day experiences that we have. It's obviously nice to get abroad, and it's lovely to see that school trips to places like Iceland are restarting again. But of course Iceland doesn't have the ordinary survey mapping. So if we're talking about fieldwork using OS mapping, what we're really looking at is looking at perhaps more local to our school contexts. So as was mentioned, I'm currently the GA president for this year. And the little cartoon there was drawn by Tom Morgan-Jones. And he was the illustrator of the Mission Explore books that I got involved in writing with Dan Raven Ellison. And if you know the Mission Explore book, you'll know that this was about creative ideas for fieldwork. So that's what I'm hopefully going to share today. I don't anticipate it necessarily taking as long as five o'clock. If it does, that's fine. And if you've got lots of questions, that's also fine. The idea is to give you a range of ideas really for how you use digital map for schools within your own school context. I'm not also going to do a lot of practical showing you step-by-step how to do certain things, because I think that Kit Rackley did that in an outstanding way in the previous webinar to this that Adina put on. And Darren Bailey also offers frequent webinars on how to use the functionality of digital map for schools. But I'm going to talk about how I've used the service, which I've been using right from the start. I remember back to actually before digital map, when the Ordnance Survey gave away free maps to every Year 7 pupil. Those of you who've been teaching for quite a long time now will remember that perhaps where you've got a lovely box of Ordnance Survey maps for every single Year 7 student. And then when I worked for the GA, I actually wrote the booklet that went out with the maps to explain how to use them and gave lots of practical ideas. And it was called The Language of Landscape. Now you can still find that on the archive site if you go to archive.org, The Language of Landscape. And what it did was it had lots of ideas for using maps for field work. But the idea that actually, like all geography, we have vocabulary in geography. And we also need a grammar. We need to actually put that vocabulary together to make sense of the landscape. And Ordnance Survey maps are clearly one of the best ways perhaps of taking the language of landscape and turning it into stories. We also use maps obviously in preparing for the field trip, carrying out risk assessments. And then in terms of data collection and presentation. And then obviously we can look at mapping routes, transects perhaps that we're going to take so that students don't get lost. And also adding images, images that we've perhaps taken ourselves or images from Geograph, the website which has sort of crowd sourced millions of images of every grid square within the UK. This is a very simple start. This is just a one kilometer radius from the school where I work in Ely in Cambridgeshire. And this uses the buffer tool, a simple GIS tool which delimits an area around. In this case it's a point, but you can also do a buffer around a line. So what this is telling me is everywhere within one kilometer of my classroom. And of course, during the lockdown we had to stay within particular distances in France. They were very specific about the distance you could travel from home. And you had to have paperwork if you wanted to go any further than that. But it's a reminder that even just within this one kilometer we've got a huge variety of opportunities for students to investigate what's there. And particularly with early years, there's options here for looking at what map symbols we have. And obviously, this is a 1 to 50,000 map here, but if we actually zoomed in, actually 1 to 25,000, but if we zoomed in we could actually get more detail on the mapping. And what we can do is we can actually investigate the variety of things which there are within the local area. Now it's also reminded that many of our students are perhaps driven to school. They come into school and approach it from the same direction each day. If they're not living in the place where the school is, then they don't necessarily actually know the local area around the school. They're not necessarily familiar with what there is in different directions than they would always come. So they have this very linear approach to school. They dropped off at school, picked up at the end of the day and taken back out the same route. As to what's the other side of the school, no idea, never been there. So don't assume that students have a knowledge and appreciation of the immediate area around the school. And it's actually possibly worth just taking a little tour or just showing them using the aerial imagery, the actual variety of land users, of types of housing, perhaps the street names you could look at. Aerial X imagery layer includes the street names. And sometimes you can identify, for example, an estate within your town, which perhaps has themes to the street names. I grew up on an estate where the streets were named after trees, but maybe you've got a local estate named after prime ministers or birds. There's all sorts of various options. If you do have an interesting estate which has themed street names, it might be nice to put it in the chat, see what sort of creative ideas property developers are having these days. I'm yet to see an estate named after geographers, but I'm sure there's streets named after famous geographers that you might be able to identify. Well, maybe you can identify streets where there's a link with perhaps the names of staff or the names of students and do a sort of a creative treasure hunt to try and find little creative opportunities within the local area. Maybe there's one with an amusing name which you can go and have a picture taken next to challenge your students to get themselves next to a place name that matches their own surname, for example. So there's a range of little creative tasks there around the school site itself, even just within one kilometer. I mean, we've got, for example, a golf club. We've got a new bypass which was built, which just skirts that area. We've obviously got shopping, residential, a little bit of industry. We've got some river running through it, the Great Ooze. We've got tourism, and we've got a range of things there just within one kilometer. And obviously you could extend that to two, to five, to 10, even to 100 if you zoom out. And one thing we do with students is also when we're doing, for example, things like working food, trying to identify local food processes, local sort of food and land use, and try and think about how we might map that as well. So let's just have a look at the chat here. We've got Victorian landowners as street references, national trust properties. There's a couple there. So thank you for that. Now, just before we get any further, I just want to use this opportunity to just mention the National Fieldwork Week that the GA is organizing in the week beginning the 6th of June. This is part of our sort of long-standing commitment, really, in the GA to fieldwork. We previously had a whole year of fieldwork. This time we're narrowing the scale a little bit. I'm just saying to people, in that week after the Jubilee, when we've had the Queens Platinum Jubilee weekend, to actually try and do a little bit of fieldwork locally, perhaps, on the school site. There's as many groups as possible, and then share with us at the GA what you get up to. Because, of course, we haven't been able to go out with students for some time. At my own school, we've just sort of restarted some field trips beyond the school site. We've got a history trip going out to a local castle, for example, next week, the year 7s. So we are starting to see that happening again, in a little while. So it's really just an attempt to think about, you know, let's just get outside. As the weather improves, hopefully in June, the weather's going to be lovely and sunny, and we can head out there and really just focus on that for a week. So I've got a whole range of activities, and my aim is to get every single group in the school out for some sort of time during that week to do an activity, which will all be shared immediately on my blog's Living Geography blog. So this is my school location. As you can see, I've sort of badged up my Did You Map for Schools interface, which is easy to do, if you haven't done it already, and also made sure that that's shared with the school community. Remember, if you do have a subscription, it is for the school community. It's not just for the geography department. Make sure that all of your colleagues know that you're able to access mapping. And I know that some of my maths colleagues, for example, are using this. English colleagues are using it. And then within the school, you might have other groups of organizations who would find a use for it. We also very much explain to the students that Did You Map is a type of geographical information system, and these work on a series of layers. So the actual base map is the base on which you place other things. So it's possible to put information about imagery, for example. We can put other data on top of the layers. And some of the webinars that Did You Map for Schools have offered in the past give you information and explanation about how to add, for example, images, how to add your own data, and how to sort of layer up the map with other things on top of it. So what we're really doing with field work is we're thinking, okay, so I've got my base map, so what sort of information can I add to the map? What sort of stories can I add to the map? And if you explain that a map is a story and that you're going to really just build up a story using the mapping, that might be a way into actually students seeing a map slightly differently. Now, I mentioned the GA's commitment to field work, and as as a president, what I've done is I've looked back for other presidents, I'm the 106th president. There's actually some quite authoritative people really. We have Patrick Bailey the quote here. It was president in 1975, and he talks about field work really being the best and most immediate means of bringing the knowledge and the study together in the experience of the pupil. It's not an optional extra, it's an essential part of what we do. We also had Jeffrey Hutchings, who was right at the start of the field studies council, and he looked at this idea of field sketching. So this suggestion of thinking about mapping and sketching, taking students to a location, getting them to sketch the landscape from that sort of oblique view, and then using the aerial plan view of the map to perhaps add in the labeling to see what's in the distance. If you've got the Ordnance Surveys map's app, you can also have their augmented reality function, which allows you to look at the landscape through the camera viewfinder and it actually overlays the names of exactly what you're looking at. So, you know, really, really excellent extra functionality. And somebody might have heard this quote about field work, geography without field work being like science without experiments. I have certainly used a lot in the past. And I traced it back to John Allen Patmore, who was a geographer at Hull, where I trained as a teacher actually, and he has this lovely quote here as geography being an impoverished shadow if it's just confined within the classroom. We need to head out there, we need to get in touch with the landscape. And so Ordnance Survey maps are really key to that process of getting students outside. When we're planning field work, we can't help but use those maps to help us work out what we're going to see. But also then to capture and record what we found and to map it. And as a get outside champion, as was mentioned at the start there, I was fortunate to meet with people who use maps every single day in their work. Lots of the people here hidden behind the maps here, you can perhaps work out who I am. But to my left, for example, a lady who essentially is one of the Instagram influencers who spends her life outdoors and promoting products but also traveling the world and using mapping all the time to plan her adventures and to actually record where she's been and sharing that with people who follow her. What I also was able to do actually as a result of that was write one of the sections for one of the Ordnance Survey's puzzle books. Now, again I haven't seen the OS's puzzle books. I think we're now on the fourth or fifth puzzle book. Each one has a particular theme. There's a fairly new one that's come out just for children. There's one which was slightly more of a historical look. And this one was a sort of a puzzle tour of Britain. As part of that I was asked to write a little introduction to the east of England and asked about my favourite walk. So this was the walk that I chose. It's a walk through the pine woods from Wales next to sea on the Norfolk Coast. I live in Norfolk close to the coast but my daughter's just headed off to Wales to get some fish and chips. And then through the pine woods there the Holcomb Meals round to the famous beach at Holcomb which is often features and the best beaches in the world. It's been used in all sorts of films and then back through the estate at Holcomb Hall and around itself. So it's a reminder as well that as teachers it's always a good idea perhaps to use mapping to share our interests with the students. So you know sharing stories, sharing and mapping as holidays are coming up thinking about asking people whereabouts within the UK are you heading? Let's start mapping these. Let's start thinking about how we use maps to just unpick our local landscapes Now Dori Massey talked about maps as a surface on which stories take place. So think of the Ordigy Map for Schools as being your setting really for the stories. You can zoom into a wood and obviously again you see here this is designed for younger younger students how we might think of a wood or an environment as being a place where lots of little stories can take place fantasy, imagination, mapping thinking about different scales of looking at a place. So one way of looking at maps then is using them as a lens for exploring a place. So thinking about how you might use some of these words and explore how the place where you work or the place where you're visiting might actually match some of these descriptions. So if we take for example accessibility how accessible is your local area to everybody? How accessible is the countryside to everybody? How diverse is it? How prosperous is it? How unequal is it? And using the mapping as the basis for then some exploration where you then can start to use some of the annotation tools and you'll be aware I'm sure that the annotation tools in DigiMap include a whole range of symbology including smiley faces, happy faces. So on a very simple level with the students what you can do is perhaps get them to think about areas within the local area even within the school site which they perhaps feel could do with improvements or where they feel happy, where they like to spend time and obviously what you can do is work on this perhaps within groups just to focus on particular aspects of the school site. It's always nice when students have something which produces an outcome that geography has some sort of outcome so I'm sure you've taken part in projects perhaps where the pupil voice has been important and so printing out a map of the school site using the master map level zooming right into the school showing all the buildings all the pathways or printing off an aerial view of the geography view of the site and then getting the students to add those extra little bits of labeling and text labels of how they might improve the site where they've spotted particular ecosystems which might need improving and also we've been part of the queen's green canopy and started to plant a few trees as part of that attempt to sort of green up the landscape and so maybe that's something you could explore in terms of tree planting places to plant trees where's the best place to put the new benches where's the best place to spend any sort of money that you might have to improve and green up the site for your learners. The other thing to do is to share it with your widest community so we've got an outside sort of education group within the school maybe you've got Duke of Edinburgh's award I'm just making sure that they're aware of the opportunities there to expand that sort of idea of field work as well. We can also add our own data and I'm not going to play this video but it's a reminder that there are short videos on the Digital Map YouTube channel which just take you through how you might add your own data. So for example if you go out into the local area and you have students visiting particular locations and you know the location, the grid reference of that location what you can do is you can put that location information into a spreadsheet save it as what's called a CSV file and then you can add that data to your map layer. Now let's just go back again so here's when we talk about CSV for those who are not sure so there's for example an Excel format where you've got the cells so each bit of information is in a particular cell and all that CSV file does is it takes away the lines if you like and replaces them with a comma so the variables are separated by a comma so CSV stands for comma separated variable so 512 is 5 meters along from the groin and the sediment depth is 12 it's just a simple way that Digital Map is able then to use that data to plot the values for you again if you want more information that Darren's produced a lovely video explaining that but what you might want to do then is think about well what data am I going to collect I'm going to then be able to add to the map so we take our students to and standard it's on the Norfolk coast and there's a theme emerging here it's described as a Victorian seaside town which is interesting because what we can do of course is we can say to the students well what was it like in Victorian times and we can use the older map layers we can go back to the 1950s or the 1890s using the map slider tool which I'm sure you're all aware of and if not have a look at the YouTube channel for a look at the map slider tool I'll show a few of these later on by the way I'll just do a little demo and did you map a little bit later but what you're able to do of course they then go back to the 1890s and the students can see well actually had Stanton was quite different back then it had a railway line connecting it to Kingsland and to London in fact and a lot of the tourists would have arrived on by train that's no longer possible because Beaching closed that line we have long queues of traffic heading into Stanton every bank holiday if only the train line was still there so we can start to think about that notion of transport and sustainability but also think about how Stanton itself has changed in that time we can look for example at the famous stripy cliffs of Stanton which perhaps feature in your GCSE studies if you do Norfolk as your case study how far back of those cliffs was treated since Victorian times we're always told that the Norfolk coast is retreating rapidly but actually this particular bit of it hasn't changed very much in over a century because we've got slightly more resistant rocks the further round the coastline at Haysborough you do have the softer rocks and you do have that very rapid erosion which some of you might look at and study with your students so some of these houses here some of the Victorian villas there are no real danger of falling into sea anytime soon so we take our year fours to Hans Stanton actually we took them in the first the first week of term when we were able to and they had a fantastic time this was our theme what makes Hans Stanton a special place they got to interview tourists and residents we plotted some of the results of that on the mapping we also added in some images from Geograph Geograph is a website which crowdsourced millions of images of the UK and if you go to add an image there's a little camera icon there down the left hand side of the screen if you click there and then put in an image search term so I just used the word cliff then you can see a whole range of pictures that people have submitted to Geograph and they're shown by these little green circles here and the number is how many pictures there are so you can as you zoom in you get this granularity that the dots separate out so that might have started out as 10 originally but I've zoomed in and it's split up a little bit if you zoomed in a bit more those eight images presumably of the cliff taken from the beach would begin to separate out as well there's millions of images and obviously I have to search for cliff there if I search for beach or some other geographical feature whether that's a physical feature or a human feature then I can sort of investigate so what I can start to do of course is even before I've got to Hans Danton students can have a look at where they're going to go and they can start to assess any risks that they might face or there's clearly a cliff edge here which you might not want to go close to there's open water there's roads with traffic which they're going to have to cross and they begin themselves to think about the risks and assess the risks themselves rather than you telling them what the risks are ask them to work out what the risks are going to be and what strategies they're going to have to keep themselves safe and that gives across that notion of them being involved in the process so when we print off some maps the actual maps we print off for students what we do is we actually print them off as colouring maps if you go to the layers option and the layers option it's down in the left-hand column again the layers option is the fourth one down so you've got the pencil and then the fourth one down is that that GIS type diagram with the layers one of the the UK options for layers is to print it off as a colouring in sheet it also makes a nice little mindfulness activity for the last week of term print off a little bit of a local area and colour it in what could be better but the thing about this option is it removes that sensory overload that you sometimes get in a good way with OS maps that sometimes they do have so much information on them they're actually just printing them off as base maps and obviously students could potentially actually colour them in in situ take some and actually do a land use mapping in real time do their sort of shop classification or you could do wait till you come back and then they could use the data they've collected by writing in on the sheet to actually use the annotation tools to add some coloured polygons to create a map and this in the last few years what I've done is given students the option of either producing a hand drawn map or using DigiMap to add some polygons onto a base layer to produce their results of their high street shopping survey and it's also a reminder that students that the best tool for field work is your eyes and it's something that's free they don't have to necessarily have lots of expensive equipment to do field work just observing and recording if you've got a map printed off from DigiMap in this format and you're observing and recording and what you can be observing of course is lots of things so there's the colouring in layer it only works at certain scales it doesn't work at the very sort of zoomed out scale you have to get relatively close in for it to zoom in and you'll see it working because it will do sort of paint across and it will replace the usual base map with a a nice sort of coloured layer and you can also change the transparency of that as well which is interesting so with the students what we do is we think about seaside vocabulary so this is a little word cloud made using Tocedo these are words which I ask people what does when you think of the seaside what comes to mind and then just made it into the shape of the UK and you can see fish and chips is what most people thought of sand castles, deck chairs there's all sorts of other things in there student spot it says dirty toilets immediately even though it's in tiny letters but you can make your own sort of vocabulary you can start to label up the mapping using the labelling tool very simply you can add different colours and what you're really doing is observing what you're seeing there but that could also be things that you're hearing you know where are you hearing certain sounds where do you hear the bingo caller where do you hear the sizzling of the fish and chip fryer or the ice cream van or the seagull that's loving it because your students have just finished their pat lunch and there's just food everywhere all over the place where they've been sat we also tell our students that there used to be a pier at Handstandton but the pier has disappeared where did they think the pier was and they begin to look for possible locations for a pier if they were building a pier where might they put it and how would a pier help rejuvenate the tourist economy places like Southworld have added a pier and it's brought in lots of extra visitors if you're looking at tourism and regeneration and actually taking a trip to some of those locations you can actually look at how it's changed so this is Handstandton and actually they find out that Handstandton actually wasn't always in the same place if you go north from Handstandton there's a place that's now called Old Handstandton but originally it was actually called Handstandton the place that's now called Handstandton was originally called Handstandton St Edmonds so a reminder that places that they think of as perhaps always having been called one thing actually may have changed over time places evolve all the time and their visit is just part of that evolution they're capturing the place at the moment in time so they're also travelling through time as they're doing their geography too and then we can obviously find some old photographs and postcards we challenge our students to sometimes find the location where old pictures and old postcards were taken there's lots of old postcards for sale on eBay which means you can search on eBay for old postcard of wherever you're studying grab the image, print some of those off hand them out to the students tell me where that is, find the same location perhaps stand in the same place and take the photograph it's something we actually have also done on the school site itself because the school I previously taught at we had some pictures taken about 100 years previously and lovely to show them how the school itself had changed over time this is eight way thinking which we also use with the younger students, three things that they can see three things that they can count, three feelings they have three things actions they can see people doing three sounds they can hear Google eight way thinking you can find that as a PDF if you had colon PDF to your search it will just bring back PDF documents related to eight way thinking which include that little sheet there which we use the other thing about the digital map for schools fieldwork is that all the imagery is cloud free so you're guaranteed that you're going to get a lovely clear image of wherever it is so this is a caravan site in Hans Danton and we can talk to young people about what used to be there how is this how has the land use changed what impact does this have on the place and they're amazed to find out that the population of Hans Danton more than doubles three or four times in the summer months and there's actually a Tesco soup store in Hans Danton which would never be there if it didn't have tourism because there wouldn't be enough people living in the town to justify it being there it's there because of the tourism so tourism also creates opportunities for people job opportunities and other things so look clearly capturing recording on the mapping if you want to take that a little bit further just for Hans Danton for example I've also written a piece for the RGS for their website which looks at the clips themselves and it's a little bit more aimed at older students but that's one option for you to take that further and it uses ordinary mapping in that as well I mentioned the OS apps this is the OS locate app it's a free app which allows you to basically record your location it also is a compass which you can use to use along with the map and what you can do is you can actually make the screen sort of transparent so you can actually look using the camera if you place it on a map through the viewfinder with the compass superimposed on top so it's lovely for the sort of navigation and then there's also this app which is not free as the previous one was but it is created by the geography fieldwork academy and it offers you the chance to record a range of different fieldwork data but what it then does is it automatically allows you to export that as a CSV file it automates that creation of the file which you would then add to your digimap layer there's a whole range of different options so this for example I'm not going to play the video again but you're going to get the link to the presentation you google jog it this one is a mood map and you can see that the cameras the phone rather on which the app is located has picked up the location and it's actually then giving you the chance to you can record your mood in a particular location it records all of those and then you can export that as a CSV file there are options for obviously having bulk purchase of the app or group sharing the app depending on your school school options for iPads and how that works within your own school or perhaps having several versions on school phones or students own personal phones depending on what budget you've got and how you view students having devices on fieldwork of course which everybody's happy for them to have them so it's just another potential option for you and so let's go back in so here's some of my students here we are on the high street there's gaps where we're able to do that we encourage them to wear masks because some of the residents obviously were a little bit wary of the young people and here they are just doing a traditional sort of little high street retail survey looking at accessibility, looking at the variety and looking also at change since the last time we did it recording each time I taught in my first school I taught for 20 years and we actually recorded and kept the data so we had decades worth of change across the high street to look at so don't discard that local data at the end of the year keep it and build up a sequence of data over the next few years because the high street is going to change isn't it the high street is inevitably going to change and adapt it always has and we've noticed some changes since the last time we were there some new businesses and others which weren't there why did those particular businesses change or move or close or feel it was the right place to start and all we do there is print off the maps again for them using the colouring layer and then they can use the shape set the colours before they add the shape set the filling before they draw the shape and then click in the corners of the shops and create their little land use maps when they return and we use rice pots classic sort of classification for retail but you can have any particular style you like this particular sheet is from the book I wrote with John Widowson Fieldwork Through Inquiry which the GA publishes but it's also available if you do a Google search and we can discuss various things about the high street thinking about building heights thinking about street furniture CCTV cameras graffiti I'm always wary of looking at negative things I like to focus more on the positive aspects of place rather than doing a chewing gum survey or something it seems a bit pointless to me but sometimes there is a link with GIS and the fact that people can report problems increasingly using GIS if they know the locations and start to map and then you can see where the problem areas are in the same way as you might have a unit on crime using the crime mapping to see where the issues are something else I did I was bored this was some years ago now was I went to Hans Stanton again first thing in the morning about five o'clock in the morning it was a really hot stuffy night I couldn't sleep so I just got up and went to Hans Stanton and took a picture of every shop in the town because why wouldn't you I showed them all up on Flickr and what I've now got is an archive of every shop so this could potentially be something you could could offer could actually if you're there early or there's not too many people around because it does look a bit weird taking a picture of every shop just capture them stick them on Flickr, it's a free photo sharing site then the students can access them they've got images that you know they've got there straight away they can go straight to that album there's all the pictures there's all the shops we saw and it captures that moment in time too so coming towards the end now there the other option is of course a virtual fieldwork Chris Durbin quote I've mentioned a lot here there's no substitute for real fieldwork you know a virtual pint of beer is not satisfying virtual fieldwork is not particularly satisfying but if it's not an option for you to go to a location and maybe it is at least a way of doing some sort of fieldwork and looking at the methods now I've shared the link there at the top on the slide and you can access this this separately but this is a book by Rob McFarland called The Old Ways and what I did some years ago was actually show how it is possible to follow the walk that Rob McFarland takes in this book it's a walk across the Cairngorms so if you're looking at the Cairngorms there's an upland area a glaciated area as a scenic area within Scotland if you go to the actual Digimap site and you start where Rob McFarland started his walk you could actually exactly follow where he went and you can see exactly what he's describing as an example of how you perhaps can encourage students to do some writing around following a route and actually connecting what they're seeing on the map to their actual actual writing if I had a bit more time we could have a go at that but if you've got a copy of the book start on page 188 and follow Rob McFarland and one of his walks this is something else that I actually started during lockdown I need to develop a little bit more but I've got a dashcam which I use and it's obviously constantly recording the route and the idea is that you give the students a map of your local area and then you drive just drive around the area for a little bit drive around some of the routes just recording all the time download the little video that the dashcam creates and just snip a little section and just show them perhaps a 30 second clip if you're driving along a road following the speed limit and the students have to work out where about you were so drive past in a very obvious church for example on the left-hand side of the road where is that on the map I'd be driving if I had that church on the left-hand side of the road and then I passed a public house so it's a variation really on that idea of following a route on the map from a description which direction was this photo taken it's one I just had and haven't done too much with but it's a virtual fieldwork example for looking at your local area or a place which is not necessarily local even I think it's an idea that's got legs and I've tried it once and it seemed to work okay so I just need to write it up a little bit more and share it a bit more widely so that's a bit of a premiere for this particular event also slowways a walking website started by Dan Ellison so think about possibly looking at the slowway site find a local route walk it and map it and contribute to that and then this was an idea from Brendan Conway some of you might use Mentimeter already Mentimeter is a way of polling and collecting using a website or a smart phone what you do is you set up a survey on Mentimeter and then you make it open and people can access and add their contributions one of the things that Mentimeter can create is these little spider diagrams so what you can basically do is what Brendan does is he sets up this microclimate survey on Mentimeter so you go to Mentimeter you say can I start a new presentation and I want it to create a spider diagram and it will say okay so how many questions and you say okay so I want the first question to be shade from trees then shade from buildings then ground and so on and what you then do is get the students to assess on a scale and what the program then does is it collects the values that people have put in and generates this image if you then save those images you can then add those images to your Ordnance Survey base layer so this is how the site looks so I've chosen to collect information on the scale I'm going to record it as a spider chart and what Brendan has then done is taken those images and placed them within on the actual Ordnance Survey mapping as an image so rather than being a picture of an actual photograph it's actually an image of the results of the Microclimate Survey in the various places on the school site where that data was collected it's another just a slight variation I'm just adding the values but these images are created using this survey called Mentimeter it also can create other types of objects it doesn't just create scales it might be worth having a quick look if you haven't already taken a look at this I use it quite a bit for collecting student responses now that the students in my school have their own devices bring your own device policy all I have to do is set up a mentee at the beginning and I can collect their views on all sorts of things very quickly within the classroom so coming towards the end then a reminder of the National Fieldwork Week we have a website with lots of ideas where you can download resources many of which use Ordnance Survey mapping the theme is change so perhaps have a think about how that might relate to your local area and do something around the theme of change within that week and then share your outcomes with us if you're a primary or early years colleague or have an interest in that starting actually immediately after we've finished here but it will be recorded and you can access the recording there is the 8th Jog Live session which again is supporting National Fieldwork Week so if you're interested in more strategies creative strategies for fieldwork particularly for the younger students but always good to take ideas from primary colleagues for secondary work too following on you can find that on Eventbrite if you look for Jog Live with an exclamation mark and then finally of course you may have picked up on this suggestion of a new GCSE subject called Natural History which includes quite a lot of field skills the suggestion is that this is going to be about collecting and recording data about the landscape and landscape change ecosystems and identifying trees and insects and birds more of a natural history focus but I would guess that quite a lot of geographers are interested in this so we've actually set up a Facebook group for those interested in teaching this as it's not connected with OCR who are the awarding body who are developing the spec but just starting to think about and share ideas for what this might look like might be part of it if I do use Facebook I've got the GCSE Natural History Teacher's Group set up there so Fieldworks really is part of all our practice Digimap for Schools is a perfect sort of palette template on which to base your fieldwork thinking if you've got it in your school I'm sure you're using it already but what I hope I've done there is give you just a few ideas for how you might use it in slightly different ways a few links to some websites things you can use straight away and I hope you found that helpful thank you very much for listening thank you so much Alen I'm just trying to stop recording I'm just going to check if anybody has got any questions in the chat I've seen here one from Mike and basically the question is do you think having images of the area students are about to visit reduces the element of the unknown as they encounter the area for real is there a problem with this or does it present extra opportunities for analysis and interpretation okay good question yeah I think it depends on the age of students so for example with the year fours we didn't share any images one of the reasons for that is that for some of those students it was the first time they had ever been to the seaside some of your students may never have been to some locations I remember taking students from the Fens up to the Lake District and when I told them they were going to climb up to Stickle Tarn they could not believe that we were actually going to go there they didn't think we were allowed up the hills just to look at so sometimes fieldwork is this eye-opening experience so yeah absolutely you could argue it's a bit like having a spoiler alert isn't it or having a trailer for a film where it gives too much away of the story but I think when you've got students perhaps we're older and you're actually beginning to think through also the fact that some of those images on geograph perhaps were taken some years ago so it's also a reminder that this is one person's representation of that landscape and you might actually use the images as a challenge for students to to actually take their own images better images perhaps even but yeah take the point that it could ruin the surprise a little bit and actually sometimes you want that real element of surprise don't you because that's part of the whole process of going there that it isn't something completely unexpected when you get to certain locations so but yeah thank you for your question thank you so much we've got another question from Jay Kersi do you use mapping for planning the journey routes to fieldwork locations with students yeah I have done in the past what we did what we used to do actually this was some time ago now we used to go to the from Norfolk to the Yorkshire Dales and what we asked the students to do was look at each roundabout that we got to okay so there's lots of roundabouts on the A17 and to actually look at what was placed around the roundabout so roundabouts being hubs where roads intersect you've got greater sort of flow of traffic through that and so what tends to happen is that people wanting to site a petrol station a service station farm shops those sorts of things tend to locate them around the roundabouts and it was just partly a way of breaking up the journey more than anything because you know you would have that roundabout roundabout and everyone was like it part rather than just sitting there and not doing anything this was the days before mobile phones walkmans those sorts of things so yeah I have used it in the past to plot the route I think also if it's not too far a distance actually it's helpful to look at it on the map so with the year fours we really partly also wanted to show them that it wasn't going to be a really long journey because some of them were a bit a bit carsick or coach sick and you know to actually think that they were going a really long way even for me to say we're going to Norfolk they were going ooh wow you know it's 15 minutes to go from Cambridge to Norfolk but for some students they really just don't go very far when I first started teaching in Kings Lynn it's 15 minutes from Hans Stanton some students had never been to the coast some of the families just did not go out of town so for some students fieldwork is there one chance to see these places because their families otherwise would not take them there awesome thank you so much and lastly Judy Clark is asking is it possible to receive these slides and yes indeed the webinar from Kit Rackley it's great to mention the ones using the journey as part of the fieldwork so what we do in the follow-up email we're going to include Kit's webinars on that email they're very recommendable as well yeah so would it be possible to receive these slides Alan? yeah so the slides will be if you go to my blog which is called Living Geography or one word livinggeography.blogspot.org blogspot.com they will be appearing there this evening as a PDF awesome and I can send that through to you as well for putting on the perhaps a link on the the YouTube or wherever the video webinars being hosted then you can add that link there but yeah this if anyone wants to get in touch it's geoblogs on Twitter geoblogs or a.parkinson that Gmail