The popular Digimap for Schools service has been updated to include over five million photos across Great Britain. The photos, supplied by Geograph, are now available through Digimap for Schools and are set to enhance the classroom experience of discovering and exploring Great Britain.
In 2005 an idea was born for trying to capture a photograph for every 1km grid square in the country. Today thousands of photos are still added to the Geograph website http://www.geograph.org.uk every week and over 10 years the number of photos contributed has grown to over 5 million making it the most detailed crowd-sourced photographic record of the British Isles to date. All photos are moderated by volunteers and geo-located as precisely as possible. Contributors provide photos under ‘Creative Commons’ terms that permit free use for education and add keywords about their photographs.
Geograph images have now been added to Digimap for Schools so that teachers and students can easily find images of features they are interested in and see them located on the maps.
Dr Paula Owens, freelance consultant, author and trainer specialising in primary geography and sustainability has created some fabulous learning resources providing teachers ideas on how to make the most of this new addition: “Geograph brings maps to life by linking its amazing and diverse catalogue of photographs to specific locations. It’s a lot of fun, and very engaging for learners to be able to explore Great Britain in a new way’’
Barry Hunter, one of the founders of Geograph agrees “We wanted to find more ways of helping teachers access the images in the classroom and this was ideal. Our contributors are public spirited people who are pleased to know that their photos will be helping children understand the landscape. We hope students will be inspired to add some new photos too”
Elaine Owen Schools Manager at Ordnance Survey The Geograph photos are a fantastic reflection of our land and cityscapes and we admire the care that photographers have taken to add detailed metadata. This makes them easily searchable for students and teachers seeking images to support both physical and human geography investigations.
Anne Robertson, Digimap for Schools Manager at EDINA, University of Edinburgh We’re thrilled to be delivering this new content to primary and secondary schools throughout Great Britain. The Geograph photos can be relevant to so many subject areas – from the primary teacher discussing with their pupils the location of lighthouses around our shores, the geography teacher describing drumlins, dolines and ox-bow lakes, the history teacher explaining a broch, mercat cross or doocot or the physics teacher wishing to challenge their pupils to explain ghostly brocken spectres, there is something for all!
About Geograph:
We aim to collect, publish, organise and preserve representative images and associated information for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. Through the Geograph® website the geographical database is freely available to the public. There is a dedicated version of the site for schools.
All photographic submissions are licensed by the original submitter under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike licence granting everyone the rights to use the image for any purpose (including coursework and teaching materials), as long as credit is given to the copyright holder and that derivative works use the same licence.
About Ordnance Survey:
Britain’s mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, makes the most up-to-date and accurate digital and paper maps of the country. Each day OS makes over 10,000 changes to its database of more than 500 million geographic features. Since 1791 OS content has been used to help governments, companies and individuals work more effectively both here and around the world. The information OS gathers helps keep the nation, economy and infrastructure moving.