Recently in Guestblogger Series Category

Shaj Mathew is a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Maryland. When he's not in school, he reads The New Yorker and talks soccer on his website. He was most recently published in the online literary magazine, The Millions. You can reach him at shaj.mathew@gmail.com.

If you would like to guest blog for My Wonderful World, please contact Sarah Jane: scaban@ngs.org.



The quintessential Indian car, the Hindustan Ambassador has remained popular despite an influx of new foreign imports.


Um...is that cow going to move?

The engine of the Toyota Innova (think Sienna lite) stutters to a low growl, providing an ambient backdrop in the few seconds of peace. Then a succession of high-pitched, squeaky horns arrest me, and I'm subject to the whimsy of my driver, whose vertiginous lane-changes (every few seconds at least), predilection for honking (often for no apparent reason), and blatant disregard for the few traffic regulations (which may or may not actually exist) make your average Grand Theft Auto player seem like an overly cautious motorist.The cow moves; we veer back on the road; I close my eyes.

Dear God, I don't want to die young - really.

Jim is the Director of Learning at Leap Frog, which designs and develops innovative and creative educational products. He loves "the 'ah-ha"'moment of learning something new, the feeling of mastery that comes with practice, and the way learning opens up new worlds to explore."

Geo-literacy is the ability to think, act, and communicate in geographic terms.  It provides a fun way to promote healthy physical development, practical skills for navigating everyday life, and broad understandings for success in a global world.  For young children, it starts with the places, people, plants, animals, and things they encounter everyday.

 Healthy Development.  Children naturally learn basic geo-literacy skills as they use their bodies to explore and make sense of their surroundings, from crawling towards a favorite toy to bicycling around a city park.  They build body awareness and spatial understanding as they go up, down, forward, backward, around, and behind.  Games and activities that include communicating about locations, directions, and positions further build these geo-literacy skills.  Parents can support them by using locational language ("your doll is under the coffee table") and by encouraging games like hide-and-seek or free play on a jungle-gym.

Local Navigation.  From digital maps and Google Earth, to GPS-enabled cars, cameras, and phones, families are increasingly surrounded by geographic information and tools.  Parents can support children's geo-literacy by talking about the locations, directions, and places that children know best. "The sun is coming up, let's go to the East side of the house and see if the kitchen table is sunny yet."  "Let's go to the end of this aisle and turn right, I think that's where the oranges are."  "Look, there's our house on the satellite photo, do you see the green park?"  "Can you draw a map of your room that shows where you want the bed to be?"

Keep reading Jim's full post on his blog!
http://community.leapfrog.com/t5/The-Learning-Team-Jim-Gray-EdD/Geo-literacy-for-kids/ba-p/1476 

Adam teaches at the Academy of Urban Planning in Bushwick, Brooklyn. in addition to teaching Global Regents, he co-teaches Urban Geography, an interdisciplinary class (History, Science, Geography) that analyzes the urban environment. A major focus of the class is Geographic Information Systems and other geospatial technology. Adam is in his 3rd year of the NSF funded City as Lab program with Brooklyn College, which assigns PhD students to his class to support inquiry and project learning. If you are interested in getting involed, please get in touch with him at aschwartz@aupnyc.org

Geography can take us to distant places and help us to understand the processes occurring around the world. But geographic awareness has the firmest grounding in our immediate surroundings, especially for students will a limited experience of other places. The way our city is shaped affects our student's lives intimately on a daily basis, most readily in its streets.

So this Geography Awareness Week, we had the pleasure to work with NYC's Livable Streets Initiative. Working together with Rebecca Jacobs, director of Street Education, we set out to get our kids active in transport planning.

There are few experiences more real and visceral than almost being hit by a car, an experience our students are very familiar with. In a pre-survey of experiences and attitudes (shown below), 75% report a near miss with a car. One out of every five of our students report bring hit by a car. Almost 90% of them know someone who has--there were many harrowing stories shared in class to back up these statistics. This is clearly an area where students have a great deal of concern, if not a complete understanding. But that is a great place to start a unit!

Matt is an award-winning professional geographer who has covered the field of geography on About.com for more than a decade. He is a former adjunct university faculty member in geography, city planning and GIS intern for local government, newspaper columnist, and a disaster manager for the American Red Cross.

A new study on the number of scientific publications per capita found that European countries led the world in research and innovation. The seven most productive countries in terms of scientific research articles published per citizen are: 1) Switzerland, 2) Sweden, 3) Denmark, 4) Israel, 5) Finland, 6), the Netherlands, and 7) Canada. The U.S. ranked twelfth while Germany ranked fifteenth in the study based on scientific articles from 2005.

Check out Matt's blog for more interesting studies, articles, and other news-worthy geography!
http://geography.about.com/b/

Special Note: My sister Kate lives and teaches in India. I told her about the Blog-a-thon, and she was inspired to have her students write about geography! Thanks for sending these, Kate!

I am an English teacher at Primrose School in Puducherry. We are in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, on the Indian Ocean. In the spirit of Geography Awareness Week, I gave all my students the creative writing assignment, "If you could fly, where would you go and what would you see?" I was curious how my students would describe their land from up above. Would they write about water buffalo glistening after the monsoon rains, women weaving garlands of jasmine blossoms to wear in their hair, or business men smearing white ash kum-kums on their foreheads in devotion to Shiva at the temple before they go to the office? My students' stories are as diverse as India itself. Enjoy!
--Kate Strassman

Environmental scientist, educator, and writer Ford Cochran conducted fieldwork at Mt. St. Helens, on Hawaii's volcanoes, and in its rain forests, savannas, and deserts while a Yale graduate student. He was an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky before coming to the Geographic to help launch nationalgeographic.com in 1996. Ford has joined National Geographic expeditions to Iceland, the Mediterranean, Florida, California, Costa Rica, the Canadian Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest. He has produced more than 100 online applications and documentary websites, written for National Geographic magazine, and is now an editorial director and editor of National Geographic BlogWild.

The H1N1/swine flu outbreak has prompted officials to close hundreds of schools across the United States and left thousands of kids and teens (both sick and well) stranded at home. The U.S. Department of Education has recommended that schools and parents help students continue learning while they're home, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called on educational publishers to support the effort.

National Geographic has responded with Home Zone--two hours of programming each weekday plus streaming programs online from the National Geographic Channel, with companion activity guides from National Geographic School Publishing.

Keep reading Ford's full post on his blog!
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/blogwild/2009/11/chicken-soup-for-the-mind-home.html

Happy Friday, everyone! It was another big day here at the 'thon... so big, that we're spilling into Saturday, too! Check out a few extra posts tomorrow, including a special collection of stories written by 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in Puducherry, India!

Here's the blog wrap-up for the day:
Patrick Abbott:http://catholicgauze.blogspot.com
Jonathan Boright: http://geoserver.isciences.com/DataBlog
Stephen O'Leary: http://blog.geomeo.org
Barbaree Duke: http://gisined.blogspot.com
Sean O'Connor
Kristi Karis
Willie Shubert

Disclaimer: Geography Awareness Week Blog-a-Thon submissions represent the views of the individual contributors, and not necessarily those of National Geographic Education. While all posts have been reviewed for appropriateness, they have not been fact-checked or extensively edited.

Barbaree, a 20 year veteran K-20 educator in English and technology, currently writes curriculum, teaches professional development in Curriculum Integration and GIS in Education and tutors students at her home base, Covington, LA.

"Why do I need to know this?"  How often have you heard that question?  Geography is not the first-reach resource for most English Language Arts(ELA) teachers, but I've found the use of geospatial technology quite powerful with my students.  As one of my 7th graders said, "Everything's mappable, Mrs. Duke!"   How do you teach your students to think?  I used geospatial technology cleverly laced among the traditional and required content to bring my ELA class into the 21st Century and get my students thinking!

Keep reading Babaree's full post on her blog!

The mission of GEOMEO is to inspire teens and young adults to Explore, Celebrate and Share our natural and human world. They are using The 5 Points of Geography to guide us through the exploration.

How can one acre of land, a mere 200 feet by 200 feet, provide a full year's supply of fresh and affordable fruits, vegetables and herbs to 100 people? Sounds too good to be true? Well it is not that difficult. Your grandparents did it and a new generation of urban farmers are doing it. Here's how.

Yesterday
Back in the mid 1940s our grandparents planted and cared for over 20 million Victory Gardens that produced about 30% of all the vegetables consumed in the country. They were a secure and vital source of nutritious food during that challenging period.

Today
In many cities around the country groups are forming to plant and care for new gardens that provide fresh, affordable and safe food for urban communities. In March, First Lady Michelle Obama and young volunteers broke ground on the White House Kitchen Garden.

Keep reading Stephen's full post on GEOMEO's blog!
http://blog.geomeo.org/2009/11/18/theme--im-a-city-slicker-farmer.aspx