Friday 3 February 2017

My 3 favourite teaching websites



Today's @teachthought blogging challenge asks bloggers: 

What are your three favourite go-to sites for help/tips/resources in your teaching?

This is tough. There is so much good stuff out there. I came back from a course recently which showed me so many new sites that I felt I had to share them the Oswestry staff and to blog about it. To condense it down to just three is hard, so I've opted for sites that over the years I've come back to time and again. These three are not flash-in-the-pan-jobs but sites of timeless quality. Here goes:
Gapminder - I love this site on so many levels. It is a geography teacher's dream, not least for exploding out-of-date canards about the relative development of countries - did you know how much Bangladesh has come on since I was at school...? But perhaps the best thing about the site is Hans Rosling himself. He communicates his subject matter with such clarity and enthusiasm that it is often best to let pupils hear what they need to direct from the horse's mouth. Those racing bubbles get me (and them) every time...
Glaciers online - I'm a physical geographer at heart and this site is hard to beat for teaching some old-school glacial geomorphology. Just about every landform you could wish for is on here. It's not flashy, but it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's been a cornerstone of my U6th teaching for nearly a decade. Old, but gold.
Sheppard Software - the geography area of this site is a rich seam of locational knowledge quizzes of varying difficulty. A great place to point pupils for homework, or something to use as a starter or finisher, or as part of an end of term quiz. I come back again and again and have been doing so for years...

Addendum
I was contacted recently (3/2/2017) by a young geographer called Dakota. She put me onto this resource and asked if I'd be willing to share it here. Bloggers are always delighted to hear from their readership and so, of course, I am only too happy to oblige. Thank you, Dakota. It looks like a really interesting resource. It contains curated links to a number of websites and resources: useful for novice and experienced geographers alike :-)

Share: