Lower Secondary
Topic: Tropical Rainforests
GQ2: Where are tropical rainforests found and which areas have been deforested?
Accompanying Lesson Resource Package: Examining the extent of deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest in 2010 and 2015
Lesson Plan (iCON login required)
Lesson Slides (iCON login required)
Description: This lesson resource package uses the Web Mapping App to help students visualise the spatial distribution of deforestation the map and is intended for use in a teacher-centred lesson. There are predominately didactic teaching moments with classroom questioning to check for understanding and also student discussion activities. This is a good example of how teachers can start enhancing existing lessons with the use of GIS, without too much modification in terms of classroom instruction.
[Resources contributed by: Terence Tan, Bedok Green Secondary School]
Topic: Water Supply
GQ2: Which locations in the world are facing water shortage? Why does water shortage occur?
GIS NLC 2018 Celebratory Meeting Slides by Anglican High School (iCON login required)
Accompanying SLS Lesson (please email chia_cher_eng@moe.edu.sg to request for a copy)
Description: This SLS lesson aims to get students to identify countries and regions facing water shortage from the map and to describe the global distribution of water stressed regions, paying attention to possible demand and supply factors contributing to water shortage. This lesson may be carried out with students doing paired learning. Classroom questioning can be done using the inquiry method to guide students to deduce from observations and to provide explanations using examples that they have picked from the map.
[Resources contributed by: Chia Cher Eng & Farahdilla Mohd Ariff, Anglican High School]
This digital map can be modified to support the teaching of the Upper Secondary Geography topic of Food Resources. Visit this Storymap ("Feeding the World") for ideas.
Topic: Housing
GQ4: What are some strategies used by cities to manage housing shortage and build inclusive homes?
GIS NLC 2018 Celebratory Meeting Slides by Junyuan Secondary School (iCON login required)
Accompanying Lesson Resource Package: Singapore's Strategies to Develop Inclusive Housing
Lesson Plan (iCON login required)
Lesson Slides (iCON login required)
Video on adding layers and changing symbols (teacher created) (iCON login required)
Video on creating buffer distance (teacher created) (iCON login required)
Video on making map notes (teacher created) (iCON login required)
Video on doing filtering of an attribute table (teacher created) (iCON login required)
Description: This modified map shows data layers for students in Junyuan Secondary School to examine facilities, train stations and parks to understand how these contribute to inclusive housing. The team of teachers who made this wanted to use a scenario-based approach to get students to apply what they have learnt about inclusive housing into a very familiar context, the town their school is sited in. The students had to consider what makes housing inclusive by considering the needs of three different types of families:
- A young, newly married, couple
- A family of 6 with children and elderly grandparents in their 60s
- A family of 4 with 2 school going children in primary school
Students were asked to manipulate the maps using trial accounts (1 account per pair is ideal) and made group-based PowerPoint reports. They had to make recommendations of a location for each family type to move into, and they took screenshots and gave accompanying explanations to the screenshots for their recommendations. They collaborated over Google Slides.
There are a lot of comprehensive classroom suitable resources made for this lesson package, including screencast videos made by the teachers, many of them doing video production for the first time. This is an excellent resource for another team of teachers in another school to draw inspiration, try modifying or make their own lesson materials using those here as reference.
[Resources contributed by: John Lim Kwan Shen, Ling Wei Cong, Ng Chee Kian & Siti Shafiqah Binte Walid, Junyuan Secondary School]
Topic: Housing
GQ4: What are some strategies used by cities to manage housing and build inclusive homes?
GIS NLC 2018 Celebratory Meeting Slides by Anderson Secondary School (iCON login required)
Description: This map has some facilities and amenities focused on Ang Mo Kio Town in Singapore. The teacher has gotten her Secondary One students to measure the straight line distance of where most of them had come from (primary schools) to help them have some notion of scale as a starting activity. Focusing on the students' lived world, she then got them to examine the distribution of the nearest MRT stations to their school and also the student care service centres some of them used to attend as primary school students. They also added layers to examine where seniors stayed. Through examining these, students get a better sense of how HDB towns had been designed to include children and young people. This is an easy way to engage students on the topic of Housing and exposes students to digital maps and help them develop better geographical imaginations.
[Resources contributed by: Lenny Tusya Samsudin, Anderson Secondary School]
Topic: Transport
GQ2: Where is traffic congestion found in a city and why does it occur?
Description: This experimental map was created to help students think about causes of traffic congestion in the town of Ballarat. Landuses can influence the amount of traffic over time and landuses like kindergarten, presence of artworks and tourist landmarks like Lake Wendouree. Get students to read up about Ballarat's transport woes and then discuss what they can infer from the article and map at the time of lesson execution.
This map has a 'live' data layer on traffic and is not suitable for 'live' use to teach directly about traffic congestion. However, this is useful for teachers to try to get static map images over time to illustrate concept of time geographies in the study of traffic congestion in Lower Secondary Geography. Teachers can also try using this map as in a Storymap presentation.
[Resources contributed by: Madeline Chen, CPDD Geography Unit]
Topic: Water Supply
Geographical Investigation: Water Quality Testing
Description: This is a water GI fieldwork done with lower secondary school students. Point sampling was done at various identified areas with suitable facilities like rain shelter as consideration and minimal risk in terms of exposure to deep water. This is a form of convenience sampling. The sampling is thus representative of water quality at the edges of the reservoir only. For water research with water bodies, it is useful to check in on how the sample represents the water quality at a certain time. The purpose of fieldwork in this case is to get students to understand the sampling framework, fieldwork methods and to use the visualisations on the map to help students connect the activities they have seen at the determined spots to the values being represented on the digital map, a precious form of geographical imagination for them.
The fieldwork experiences jump-start stages of the inquiry approach to understanding water quality. Use GIS to first capture description of the water quality of a body of water at the actual point of sampling (like how Bedok Green Sec had done). Get students to consider how representative the samplings are of the big body of still water they are studying. Consider the physical limitations, and best fit of sampling method a Geography class can attempt given a limited time frame of a fieldwork session. Some facilities of the park had been included for a possible discussion of how land use can affect the water quality of the reservoir at its edges. Based on hydrology studies, water quality varies widely across a water body as well as in terms of water depth. This is something to take note if a teacher wants to attempt any form of hypothesis. Analysis given the kind of data we get (typically less than 60 points) via existing forms of fieldwork can only give guesswork at best, as demonstrated in this map.
[Resources contributed by: Bedok Green Secondary School Professional Learning Community]
[Slides and videos contributed by: Madeline Chen, CPDD Geography Unit]
Topic: Water Supply
Geographical Investigation: Water Quality Testing
Description:
This is a water GI fieldwork done with lower secondary school students. Locations for students to work in were identified bearing in mind suitable facilities like rain shelter as consideration and minimal risk in terms of exposure to deep water along the river. Students were directed to use systematic sampling to investigate water quality along the river. The sampling is representative of water quality only at the period of sampling. For water research with water bodies, it is useful to check in on how the sample represents the water quality at a certain time. The purpose of fieldwork in this case is to get students to understand the sampling framework, fieldwork methods and to use the visualisations on the map to help students connect the activities they have seen at the determined spots to the values being represented on the digital map, a precious form of geographical imagination for them.
The fieldwork experiences in this lesson uses inquiry approach to understanding water quality and also problem-based learning to guide questions to ask about water and the environment. This approach allows students to learn about water quality in an authentic manner.
Assuming the data is representative of the water quality of the river for a given time, students can then try to suggest reasons for the water quality variables they had found out. Consider the physical limitations, and best fit of sampling method a Geography class can attempt given a limited time frame of a fieldwork session, it is possible for students to also do simple ecological observations like fish survey (simple count) to try to correlate water quality variables to ecological health of the stream.
Based on hydrology studies, water quality varies widely across a water body as well as in terms of water depth. This is something to take note when attempting any form of hypothesis. Given there are at least 60 points in this survey of the river running in Springleaf Park, the analysis can be seen as representative of the river at the point of sampling.
[Resources contributed by: Victor Chia & Bernice Huang, Yishun Secondary School]