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Congratulations

You belong to a group of teachers who want their students to be prepared for everyday life.

You like to use different teaching methods in teaching geography. Your teaching is thematically varied and your teaching often deviates from the content of the textbooks. Because you have your own supply of teaching materials and preparations that are better than what the textbook offers you.

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Your teaching leads to the general development of students. What the pupils have learned in your lessons, they will also use in the teaching of other subjects and also in everyday life. Pupils express themselves correctly and intelligibly, work with resources, cooperate and argue, which they also use in teaching other subjects. You focus on developing geographical thinking, which enables pupils to apply geographical knowledge in different environments and situations. You are not afraid to work with the experiences, experiences, attitudes and opinions of your students.

You often solve current questions and problems with the pupils, you discuss with them, and you often think about how to demonstrate geographical phenomena using examples from the pupils’ everyday life, thereby developing so-called useful geography.

You work using the project method, the pupils are very involved in the teaching and the subjects covered are usually concluded with presentations by the pupils. Pupils rate your lessons as fun.

Example:

When information about a volcanic eruption appears in the media, you can immediately prepare a lesson about the effects of volcanic activity on people’s lives. Pupils in geography lessons work with photographs and video recordings capturing the stories of people living around volcanoes . Pupils discover in specific places how volcanic activity affects people’s everyday life and try to empathize with the problems that these people have to solve . By comparing different places, students discover what these places have in common and how places affected or threatened by volcanic activity differ from other places on Earth. Students present all their findings in front of the class. 

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Teachers focused on the application of the curriculum in everyday life and the general development of students

Assessment ?

To verify the pupils’ results, we use tasks in which the pupils can demonstrate developed skills.

The evaluation is based on the following criteria:

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  • geographical in content: correctness of the terms used, accuracy, attention to detail (carefulness), knowledge of the scale and properties of maps, reading contours, deriving the curvature of the Earth, determining map elements, points and marks, sorting map materials and map resources, accurate orientation in map materials and parts, 
  • competence:  expression of emotions, presentation of created map works, map processing

For formative feedback, we recommend asking questions based on the evaluation criteria for each of the topics:

Is representational accuracy important or not?

Why don’t you have it marked exactly?

Why are your contours like that?

Why do I want you to be precise?

Do you know why, do you sort your maps?

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Teacher:

    • Orientation of teaching on working with a map
    • Works with an atlas (paper or electronic) in almost every lesson
    • The map not only as a source of information, but also as an output

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Map-lover teachers enable students to develop higher levels of map skills – moving beyond map reading to map interpretation and creation. The lessons of map-lover teachers almost always include work with an atlas, teachers also use digital maps. Teachers use multiple atlases at the same time (e.g. from different publishers) in both paper and electronic (fast, fresh) form. For map-lovers, opportunities to create maps can also often be observed. Teachers develop students’ love for maps and awareness of the added value of maps for learning and thinking. The map is understood as a source of information as well as a prized output. Teachers make full use of the potential of maps in tests and other ways of evaluating students.

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Student:

    • Emphasis on building map skills
    • Map as a specific language of expression
    • Creation of maps, including digital ones

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Pupils have a large number of maps and map sketches in their notebooks or portfolios, they are often involved in the creation of maps. Based on the creation of maps and subsequent work with one’s own maps, it is possible to see and demonstrate the variability and impermanence of places and space as well as their development.

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Teacher:

    • The danger of mechanically redrawing maps from an atlas or textbook
    • A blank map is not a map-lover, you need to work with maps at a higher level
    • Emphasis on teaching cartography takes a back seat to geographical content

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Some teachers tend to overestimate this conception and others underestimate it. With map-lovers, there is a risk that the teacher thinks he is developing the students’ map skills while only testing the students on blank maps. In addition, some map-loving teachers tend to slip into very low cognitive demands when creating maps. Pupils often create their own maps, however, the creation is based on mechanical rewriting or redrawing of the facts contained in the atlas into their own map (pupils only “paint”). Maps are often static, without showing relationships, connections and processes. Another risk lies in sticking to cartographic principles without their ongoing application and connection with real geographic content. An example can be perfect land-use maps created by pupils, which are not used further in geography lessons. To a lesser extent, it is also possible to observe a separation of cartography from general and regional geography among some teachers. The teacher reduces geography to map representations and the doctrine of the representation of phenomena and processes on maps. Qualified map-lover teachers realize that a map is an ideal tool for developing students’ higher thinking operations and map skills.

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Student:

    • Overwhelmed with maps
    • The danger of boredom – when it comes to just mechanically redrawing maps
    • Absence of geographic thinking if the student only deals with maps or technical skills in GIS

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In some cases, map-lovers do not systematically develop pupils’ map skills (interpretation or creation of maps), and thus pupils often get stuck in the initial stage of developing map skills (e.g. they just redraw maps from a textbook into a notebook). For example, students most of the time assign the names of states, cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., to blank maps or create their own maps based on mechanical redrawing or coloring. For students, the creation of simple maps and sketches can be a welcome diversion but also a source of boredom, especially if the resulting map is not accompanied by other follow-up learning tasks that develop geographical thinking.

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Benefits of registered users

Exclusive access to a database and community of engaged geography teachers.
Draw inspiration for other conceptions.
Conveniently browse topics and think about your own teaching.
Know the connections between conceptions.
Experience GEOWHEEL or have instructions on how to comprehensively grasp geography education.
Archiving test results to monitor the development of one's own teacher identity.
Invitations to events with members of the project team and special events.
Access to the archive of worksheets for pupils and other teaching materials.
Detailed results with commentary and practical recommendations.
... Well, the students will simply love you, because they will enjoy your teaching!