A day at Juniper Hall

By Rowena

The other day I was talking to a friend and they asked me “I’d really like to know what you actually did at work every day”, because I’ve  got interesting new stories every week. Well, as I run the blog (as much as I can, inbetween teaching), I thought I’d write up a standard day at the River Tillingbourne, where I spend most of my time.

A day at the River with a (big) GCSE group

8.45am– Turn up to the tutor’s office for our morning meeting. Check where everyone’s going (100 at the river? Fantastic.) Listen to Jack crack out some amazing jokes and have everyone laugh.

9.00am– Set up classroom with whiteboards, booklets and check equipment. Put morning tunes on the SmartBoard. Check in with other tutors they’re happy with the day & plans.

9.25am– Check school have arrived in the main office. Photocopy nominal roll and check numbers.

9.30am– Meet teachers & group. Try and organise 100 GCSE kids into 4 class groups. They get distracted by the goats fighting. Finally get them sorted with waterproofs and wellies in the cellar.

10.00am– Introduction to the river in the classroom, using ArcGIS and whiteboards and booklets. Give out equipment. Students get confused over hydroprops. Give out lots of pencils.

11.00am– Coach to the river. This is either 20 minutes of quiet, or utter raucous noise.

11.20am– Arrive at Crossways Farm. Give safety briefing and walk down road. Students scream at the muddy entrance. Horses sometimes try to escape. Give introduction to fieldwork and set students off.

When you can't get to the autolevel for gradient #fieldworkfails #yearoffieldwork pic.twitter.com/SvBy7IEagr

— Rowena Pattenson (@Syn_Sharptooth) March 5, 2016

11.45am– Stop horses from eating hydroprop. Watch student fall in river after attempting to jump across. Pick up 6 hydroprops from where they’ve been left discarded on the ground. Field sketches using SNOTT (Scale, Notes, Orientation, Time/Date, Title).

12.00pm– Coach to Abinger Hammer. Fieldwork first. Stand for 10 minutes watching last group mess around while rest of groups eat lunch.

12.30pm– Eat lunch now last group have finished. Hope nobody is dropping litter. Hope nobody has abandoned equipment in the river.

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River

A post shared by Rowena-Jayne Pattenson (@syn_sharptooth) on Mar 14, 2017 at 12:18pm PDT

1.15pm– Fish tape measure out of river. Coach to Gomshall 2.

1.30pm– Fieldwork at Gomshall 2. Students get completely soaked as it’s the last (and deepest) river site.  Find lamprey. Students scream more.

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Mist on the river

A post shared by Rowena-Jayne Pattenson (@syn_sharptooth) on Jan 7, 2017 at 3:33am PST

2.30pm– Return to Juniper Hall on coach. Students have break. Wrestle with data and printer. Also return waterproofs.

3.00pm– Methods game & methodologies in classroom. Give out more pencils. Students forget how they measured width. Remind them.

4.00pm– Cake break. Enjoy sunshine for 10 minutes.

4.20pm– Teachers announce they want to leave early at 4.30. Quickly wrap up.

4.30pm– Put away equipment in cellar. Send through data to school on Dropbox. Answer emails. Print for tomorrow- another rivers’ day? Great! Perhaps get a cup of tea (finally).

5.45pm– HOMETIME! Perhaps drop by the kitchen for some dinner if it’s something good. Chocolate pudding? Don’t mind if I do…

 

And then we do it all again tomorrow!

 

30 Days Wild & other exciting things

By Rowena

June is fast approaching (somehow!) and is the month for biodiversity, it seems. This morning I’ve been doing a little bit of research to promote three different fantastic biodiversity projects in June, and made ourselves a board with loads of information and resources for the coming month.

30 Days Wild- All of June

Set up last year, 30 Days Wild is an awesome drive by the Wildlife Trusts to get more people outside and interacting with nature. Individuals can sign up here for a pack, which contains things like a calendar for the month, stickers, a badge, and some ideas of what to do! There are loads of free activities that the Wildlife Trusts are putting on too, which is pretty cool as it means people really have the opportunity to get out and explore.

They also have an app, which you can download for some quick ideas to get outside in nature. I’ve not downloaded it yet (too many other recording apps!) but from a quick glance, it looks pretty fun.

 

National Insect Week- 20-26th June

National Insect Week is a bi-annual event run by the Royal Entomological Society promoting insects. There are tons of events occurring during the week all over the country, which is pretty cool really, as insects are sometimes undervalued- especially the ones that aren’t “pretty”.

The section of NIW’s website I like the best is the Learning Resources area (I guess that says a lot…)- there are loads of activities and things to do; worksheets and things to read, lesson plans, podcasts and websites. Fantastic!

 

Great British Bee Count- 19th May- 30th June

Run by the Friends of the Earth, the Great British Bee Count mostly revolves around an app used to count bees. When I first downloaded it only 10 bees had been counted- now it’s over 18,000! When you spot a bee, you can record it on the app. There are handy pictures too, which makes it easy to work out what you’re looking at. It even has a few non-bees that look like bees (like wasps and bee-flies).

Record all of the bees

You can also do a timed count, watching a 50cm area for 1 minute and recording all the bees that visit the flowers you’re watching.

Putting together all these cool biodiversity projects into one board was a bit of a challenge, and I might have gotten overexcited… But there’s so much to look forward to in June!

So much biodiversity!

Top 5 fieldwork apps

By Rowena

I said I would eventually get round to writing a blog post on the apps we use here at Juniper Hall, and here it is! As we’re not always in classrooms (as expected, as we are field studies tutors, after all!), tablets are really valuable resources for recording data in new and interesting ways. They’re even better in the rain, as they don’t disintegrate like paper does- and before you question, “don’t Ipads die in the rain?”- yes they do, but not with Lifeproof covers on them!

They’ve even been dropped in the river before and survived!

I’m not going to mention all of the apps we use, just because there are so many, but here’s a top 5 of my favourites.

 

5. Freezepaint: Remix the world around you with FreezePaint – the easiest way to create fun, strange, impressionistic or beautiful compositions.

Coming in at number 5, Freezepaint is fantastic for making layered photo collages in the field. When up on the Burford Spur or the Woodlands, we use it for showing the difference in vegetation across a gradient, or between two different areas. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would be useful, with its smiling dog logo, but it’s actually a great way of visualising change where it might not be instantly obvious there’s a difference!

 

4. Dropbox: Dropbox is the place for your photos, docs, videos, and other files. Files you keep in Dropbox are safely backed up and you can get to them from all your devices. It’s easy to send large files to anyone, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.

Dropbox is so useful from day-to-day! It’s not quite as fancy and exciting as the other apps, but it’s so helpful, I just had to include it. Cloud storage is super useful, especially in this line of work, as it means you can get resources out in the middle of nowhere (if you have the mobile data for it). Pretty great if you forget something! The best bit for the teachers about cloud storage is they can access files from school once they head home from Juniper Hall.

 

3. Popplet: Popplet is the simplest tool to capture and organize your ideas. With Popplet you can quick jot down your ideas and sort them visually.

This is my favourite new mindmap generator. The app costs a little money, but there’s a free web version as well. You can add text, pictures, lines between as many boxes as you can possibly think of… videos as well! If you’re really clever with it, you can turn it into a presentation as well, which is a bit more exciting than using another powerpoint…

New astronomy resources using Popplet

2. Night Sky: Just point your device to the sky to identify stars, planets, constellations and even satellites!

Although I’ve not used this much in teaching yet, Night Sky is a fantastic little app that I instantly downloaded onto my phone. It projects loads of information onto a phone or ipad; constellations (with pictures!), stars, the planets… sometimes you see the International Space Station whizz past as well. I’ve been developing some new stargazing resources for night walks, and this is an app that’s definitely making an appearance. It can tell you all about the different things in the sky, and there’s a pretty nifty “red light” version that you can switch to so you don’t ruin your night vision.

Ursa Major, the Great Bear

1. Skitch: See something that sparks an idea? Use Skitch to snap it, mark it up, and send it on in an instant. Your bold ideas stand out even brighter with Skitch.

Skitch is definitely my favourite app out there. It’s a really simple way of creating annotated photos, which are great to have in coursework. There are loads of different things you can add to a photo- text, stickers, highlighting- so it’s really versatile. You can also annotate a map of wherever it is you find yourself, or a webpage or PDF if you really wanted to. Makes it useful for studying, as well as for using out in the field.

Not the best annotated photo, but it’s speedily done

So there you go, some really great apps you should all download. Enjoy!