Breathing Earth

Many thanks to Joel and his mum for reminding us about this site. Really interesting as we continue looking at population and development in year 9.

Is Development always good?

Many thanks to Tony Cassidy for this one. Perfect timing for year 9. Some real food for thought in this promotional video for a book.

Development: Coffee

As we start to consider the issue of development in year 9 we will think about how the worlds wealth is divided up. It is well worth spending the time reading these interviews with those involved with the coffee trade and thinking about their different experiences. What makes the difference and is this something that we can be involved in and affects us?

Measuring and Mapping Development

The trouble with development is working out what it is. Is it wealth and if so how do you measure it? Perhaps we could look at how much money a country has, but does that tell us if the money is spread across the population of a country? perhaps we look at other ways of measuring development like how long people live or how well educated they are? Even if we do work out a way of measuring development how do we find out and show which countries are most and least developed?
To make our lives easier others have tried to solve these problems for us. Take a look at this lovely graphic showing how wealth is spread across the world. Can you work out which are the poorest and richest parts of the world? Even more helpful is the gapminder site which allows you to create the most amazing and mindblowing graphs and maps on world development. A word of warning though it is not always easy to understand and you may need to take the tutorial. We will be using this in class though, so its worth taking time to understand it.

Population and Development

Year 9 are about to start their new topic of Population and Environment. With ever increasing pressures on our planets resources the scene is set for an exploration into one of worlds most pressing issues. In the first few lessons we will look at how many people there are in the world. You might want to check this out for yourself by looking at a World Clock. We will also think about the worlds resources with this short film giving us food for thought. The map above shows world population the larger the country the bigger the population, you can find more of these on the worldmapper website.

Development

After playing the trading game in year 9 we have been reflecting on what we have learned. We used the excellent site Gapminder to look at the real progress made by Bangladesh, Kenya, India, China, USA and Japan and we found that unlike our game where the poorest nations could sometimes overcome disadvantage real life less developed nations tended to stay poor.
We also looked at trends and patterns examining positive and negative correlations between different indicators some of you noticed for example that urbanisation seemed linked to incresed wealth. This led us on to the idea of cause and effect. One interesting trend was noticed by LOE3 who spotted that the number of children women had went down as more girls went to school.

So what do you think, is there a link? Is it a cause or effect and why do you think there is a link? We will discuss this in class or you could leave a comment. For those of you who we will be seeing for the last time this week, we wish you well for the future and remember to keep checking back here to find out whats going on at your old school. We'll be sad to see you go :-(

Make a chain.

Please give a little time to look at this website and join the campaign. The organisers are attempting to promote the cause of Education for all children. Members of the powerful G8 group have commited themselves to giving all children worldwide access to a primary level education by 2015 and this appeal is to provide them with a reminder and encourage them to keep to the timetable. Remember what you take for granted others need your help to gain.

Population and Development

The school theme this week has been "Developing Countries" and in year 9 we have just started our new topic of population and development. To introduce the topic we looked at the population counter and saw just how fast the worlds population is growing. We also agreed that a world with over 6.6 billion people living on it is really hard to get our head around. To help us we watched miniature earth which shows us what the world would be like as a community of only 100 people. Which poses the question; if we lived in a community where only 3 of the hundred owned 59% of the wealth would we do anything about it?

New coastline for Dubai

This image comes from Google Earth and shows the incredible new developments along the Dubai coastline. Can you spot Palm 1 and the larger Palm 2 developments?
How did they get their names and what impact could this have on the eco system?
P.S. Anyone spot a more familiar shape in the development to the right of the picture?