Monday, December 16. 2019

Today's schedule is A-AG-BCD

A Block Physical Geography - It has been a few months now since your geographic consulting company created a successful report for the town of Orting Washington on the dangers of Mt. Rainier and building a new school to accommodate growth. With the profits that your company made from the Parks Canada contract, you decided to take some time off and headed to the American Midwest for a 10 day Tornado Alley tour with Violent Skies Tours. True to form you made some contacts with people through the owners of the company and both Environment Canada (EC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have approached your company to create a map/poster on severe weather for elementary schools. Check out some examples at Canadian Geographic or National Geographic

Both EC and NOAA have indicated that the topics that you can research are: Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Thunder Storms, Lightning, Hail, Blizzards, Ice Storms, Drought, Flash Floods or Fire Storms (Forest Fires).

So you’ll need to either choose a topic (above) and identify the location where it affects the most OR choose a location in North America and identify the type of severe weather that affects that region the most (In the USA: Pacific Northwest; SoCal; Mountain West; Southwest; Midwest; West South Central-Tx; Gulf Coast-East South Central; South Atlantic; Mid Atlantic; New England; and Central Great Lakes; Hawaii; and Alaska. In Canada: SWBC; Okanagan; Rocky Mountains; Prairies; Northern Ontario-Quebec; Great Lakes; Atlantic Canada; Northern territories).

You will need to research the following about your topic:

1. What causes the Severe Weather Event to occur?
2. What kinds of damage does the Severe Weather Event inflict?
3. How is the Severe Weather Event detected and monitored?
4. Why does your chosen Severe Weather Event occur most often in the region you’ve chosen?
5. What safety precautions should one take in order to survive your chosen Severe Weather Event?
6. Give examples of the most extreme occurrences of your chosen Severe Weather Event that has happened in the region you’ve chosen.
7. A List of the websites that you used to assist in the compilation of this assignment.

There are some websites of note that can help:
National Severe Storm Laboratory (click on the education tab)
National Hurricane Centre
Storm Prediction Centre About Tornadoes
Ready.gov
Environment Canada Summer Weather Hazards webpage
How the Weather works
The weather world 2010 project
USA Today Weather and Climate Science page
Hurricane Preparation website
Winter Weather Awareness
Weather Channel Classroom
UK Official weather classroom
NOAA Weather classroom Jet Stream
USGS Natural Hazards
NASA Earth Data Natural Hazards
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Natural Hazards

WAIT...Of course, you may complete an alternate project as well. You and two others may become a weather forecaster and weather news interest broadcaster. So…

Congratulations you have received a job as a meteorologist with Environment Canada (or whichever meteorological organization you choose). You are to prepare a weather report for a newscast using the required information.  You will be working in groups of three and each person is required to contribute to the creation of the weather forecast and the presentation.

What to Do:

1.  Watch the news or the weather channel to see how they relay the weather.
2.  Choose a job and complete the requirements for each job.
3.  Work as a team to create a “live weather report” (forecast and a weather news on scene report) as a movie, using the green screen in room 003.
4.  Create a script for your weather report (to be handed in)
5.  Use a weather map from Windy tv as your forecast with a minimum of five days forecast.
6.  Dress for success.  Make sure you look the part of your character on the show.
7.  The report should be 5-10 minutes long

For your green screen backgrounds consider using any of the following (you’ll need to edit backgrounds on your own)

https://www.stockfootageforfree.com/
http://www.footagefirm.com/free-footage/
https://www.detonationfilms.com/Stock_Directory.html (clouds/fog)
https://www.pond5.com/stock-video-footage/1/weather.html (has icons on them but still lots of good stuff)

There are good background graphics here http://www.bbc.com/weather/6173331
You could use Google Earth screen captures or screen captures from CTV news http://bc.ctvnews.ca/weather (the storm tracker and weather radar loops are good animated gifs) AND the best one is Windy TV

There are green screen backgrounds for a news set here http://www.cg4tv.com/virtual-set/weather-virtual-set.html

Two video weather report intros that you can use can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfyY868Ah0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2u2OqX331c

There are some good animated weather icons you could use here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6eIHZYWzVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8SBnUZQe2Q

How to Create Your Own Green Screen Effects

If you have Apple products, then consider:
Veescope Live Green Screen App
YourCaster

B Block Human Geography - Today we start our two week look at agriculture. Our key issue today will be "Where Did Agriculture Originate?" I'll have you look at crop and domesticated animal hearths and have you understand the difference between subsistence and commercial agriculture.




C/D Blocks Environmental & Social Sciences - We'll start with Young, so we'll be in 115 for C Block. Our focus this week is on the potential for melding worldviews into something environmentally sustainable, Doug Herman from Smithsonian calls it Indigeneity

Indigeneity is a way of being in the world: being indigenous to a place means having a depth of knowledge, understanding and connection to that place. Indigeneity also includes a sense of stewardship and responsibility for managing that place and working respectfully with its non-human inhabitants.

We'll re-examine the differences between the "Western" worldview (hailing from philosophers in the Enlightenment such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Descartes) where understanding and using science, rather than religion, to explain natural phenomena became a staple of western society and an "Indigenous" worldview which focuses on connections between all things, including the visible physical world and the invisible spiritual world, seeing time as always in a cycle of renewal that links past and present and future. It is important to recognize that "Western" and "Indigenous" are blanket terms and there was/is many points of view held by European people and Indigenous populations. You do know, however, that Western linear and scientific belief came to view Indigenous circular and spiritual belief as inferior and therefore ignored the traditional knowledge gained through millennia of living with the land. From Indigenous Corporate Training Inc.,

The root of the difference between the worldviews is that they generally subscribe to opposite approaches to knowledge, connectedness, and science. Indigenous cultures focus on a holistic understanding of the whole that emerged from the millennium of their existence and experiences. Traditional Western worldviews tend to be more concerned with science and concentrate on compartmentalized knowledge and then focus on understanding the bigger, related picture.

Today we'll watch some TED, starting with Wade Davis and Jacinta Koolmatrie...

After these two TED talks we'll try to see how modern science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge can be identified in Indigeneity. Check out the article Walking Together: First Nations, Métis and Inuit Perspectives in Curriculum Worldview. Tomorrow more on TEK

In D Block with Benton, in 145, you'll work on your Ptarmigan/ Marmot paper. To help check out: