Starting to teach...

OK, so some of us are starting to teach the new specification this week. Exciting times !
Don't forget the Edexcel Geography NING, where 240 people are now sharing ideas and resources (well, some of them - don't be shy !) and gaining the benefits of NETWORKING.

There has been plenty of relevant news over the last few weeks to keep us all up to date with new case study material to supplement the new textbooks.

• Crime maps published by the Metropolitan Police and other police areas
• The arrival of Hurricane Gustav and evacuation of New Orleans
• Thanks to Alix on SLN for tip-off to excellent article in The Guardian on the CHAR dwellers of Bangladesh.

The Jamuna river is often called the "Jamuna braid". It is 22km at its widest point and it splits into estuaries and channels, diverging and reconnecting to create a shifting landscape that is part land, part water. It is in the Jamuna braid that most of Bangladesh's chars are located. The chars - islands made of river silt - are strange land formations that inhabit the space between land and water. Every year in Bangladesh, new chars emerge out of the river's changing course; and as they appear, old ones are returned to the water, swallowed by the river as though it is collecting on an old debt. The story of these chars, and the people who inhabit them, is a catalogue of migrating loss, of land earned and forsaken.

Extract from article by Tahmima Anam

Associated with this is an excellent picture set with informative captions that has been placed on FLICKR by the BBC WORLD SERVICE.
The FLICKR set is one of several, and features the inhabitants of the BOU DOBA CHAR.

Just developing a theme on this for my SAGT Presentation in October on Geography and the Media, and this is going to go in there....

• Also check out the book: THE BOTTOM BILLION. This has been recommended to me by a couple of people, and also some members of the NING.

This looks at the important information that although we often talk about the dramatic rate of growth that is taking place in the developing world, we need to remember that of the 5 billion people in the developing world (with 1 billion in the developed world), it is the 'middle' 4 billion that are seeing the greatest improvement: the bottom billion are not sharing in this: see the graph below for a visual on that...

An associated resource is a nice FLASH based resource produced by the Royal Geographical Society, which asks students to work out where all the world's billionaires are located.