Geography – Digital resources and remote learning for GCSE and A Level
17 April 2020
Shelley Monk, Geography Subject Advisor
We’ve been working hard to put together some guidance for your students about using our teaching and learning resources, as well as ways to use past exam material.
Each section in my blog provides lots of ideas for how your students could use the content available, in order to build their confidence, and keep them engaged by working independently using a variety of resources.
Resources for teachers
If you are delivering our geography qualifications and you are developing or looking for resources to support your students with their remote learning then we hope this blog helps by highlighting new and existing OCR resources as well as those in the subject community.
We have shared our GCSE and A Level Geography workshop materials developed for the Geographical Association (GA) conference and these can be downloaded from the Geography News.
Our assessment material continues to be available, whether that is past papers and mark schemes, candidate exemplars or examiner reports. The ExamBuilder tool may well be most helpful at this time as you could build bespoke assessments for your students whether that is a topic test, or by question type e.g. case study, synoptic, essay or perhaps more skills oriented e.g. geographical and also fieldwork (GCSE) skills.
We have CPD materials available for you to download and these can be found in past events. If there is anything you cannot locate, please let us know.
Field Studies Council (FSC) – live online lessons for KS3, GCSE and A Level students
FSC are pleased to announce that the free #fieldworklive lessons hosted by Encounter Edu and led by our expert field tutors are now available to book. The sessions will build students’ geographical and scientific enquiry skills in various locations.
#Fieldworklive encompasses ten live lessons broadcast for different age groups, giving all students the valuable opportunity to experience fieldwork this spring. The live lessons are taking place from Monday 20th April to Friday 1 May 2020. Visit Encounter Edu for more information and bookings.
GCSE A and B resources
All of the resource materials within the Planning and Teaching section - GCSE A and GCSE B can be found on our qualification pages.
Topic content: Our delivery guides have a wide range of resources, web links and student activity sheets embedded in our digital resource. These can be accessed for free, downloaded and shared with your students. We have developed resources related to the extreme weather content.
Embedding geographical skills: This resource includes information, weblinks and student activities for all of the geographical skills included in the specification. There are two storymaps available for all of the geographical skills, these explain and give examples of each type of map, graph and chart.
Fieldwork skills: Our new factsheet explains these skills giving examples and further resources to support students in developing these skills. Our new embedding fieldwork skills resource provides a variety of activities which can be used in teaching and learning to help support the delivery of these skills.
Case studies: There are two blogs we’d like to share:
- Creative case studies. This article was based on a workshop at the GA Conference
- Jo Cole’s article: Lessons from the exam season: conquering the case study.
Subject community resources
There are several digital platforms that provide some really engaging resources to use with students and these align with our GCSE specifications. They include:
For any students who are looking to study Geography at A Level, the Geographical Association has resources to support you.
Resources for A Level
Topic content: Our delivery guides have a wide range of resources, web links and student activity sheets embedded in our digital resource. These can be accessed for free, downloaded and shared with students.
Independent Investigation (NEA): our student guide and the Field Studies Council guide can help students understand and plan for their investigation.
Our Principal Moderator Reports and candidate exemplars have lots of reflections and top tips from Senior Assessors.
We have resource materials to share from our CPD events, to support you in developing a deeper understanding of the investigation or a series of webinars exploring the proposal form, literature review, data presentation and analysis or marking and moderation. There is also feedback and marking from the 2018 exam series.
There are a number of excellent places to find support for both teachers and students:
- The Field Studies Council has lots of ideas and resources for the NEA
- The Geographical Association has a series of webinars aimed at students to support them with their NEA
- Royal Geographical Society has a student guide to the Independent Investigation
- Insight and Perspective has produced a practical guide to the Independent Investigation (this is a published book)
Subject community resources
- Ask the Geographer podcasts exploring the latest research from the Royal Geographical Society with IBG
- Geographical has topical articles for geographers
- Although aimed at university students, the Oxbridge Essays website has detailed information about primary and secondary research for dissertations (helpful for the NEA)
- Understanding and developing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) skills:
The GA has a new section on its website called Geography from home and there are some resources for Year 11 and 13 students about preparing for A Level and making the transition to university.
Stay connected
As always, we are here to support you and your students. If you have questions you can email geography@ocr.org.uk or send your tweets @OCR_Geography where I share resources and articles.
Tell us about your most useful remote teaching resources in the comments section below. You can also sign up for email updates to receive information about resources and support.
About the author
Shelley Monk joined OCR six years ago after teaching geography for 16 years. She has considerable experience in delivering GCSE, IGCSE, A Level and the International Baccalaureate qualifications, as well as leading departments in Secondary Schools in the UK and Internationally. Shelley has eight years’ experience as Head of Year 12 and 13, supporting students both pastorally and academically.
At OCR Shelley worked with the geography team to reform the GCSE, AS and A level qualifications and she currently supports teachers through the development of a variety of resources, the CPD programme and subject communications. Beyond this role Shelley is clearly a geographer, as she loves walking her dog, exploring distant places and finding new recipes to trial on family and friends.