The windows of McDonald’s and other shops along London’s Oxford Street are boarded up and there are dozens of police in riot gear. These are the images that students see as they come into Noel Jenkins’ geography class. Projected on to a whiteboard, they grab the attention of the pupils at Hampstead School, a technology college in Kilburn, north-west London.

The pictures of the May Day riots in London last year are shown by a piece of animation software called PhotoJam. Noel uses them to start a discussion on the human effects of globalisation.

He firmly believes that information and communications technology can make a significant difference to the way his subject is taught.

“Geography is not the subject it was and now it has to compete with many other disciplines,” he explains. “We’re trying to save Geography and make it more interesting.”

He thinks an important way to make it more engaging is by using ICT to create a more active style of learning. A good example is a Year 7 lesson looking at river flooding - a difficult subject to teach in an inner-London school.

Noel believes children need something to play with if they are going to learn about physical geography. For lessons about rivers, he uses a flume, which has a water input at one end and a drain at the other. The apparatus can be used to simulate both river and coastal processes, such as how a sandy river that is flowing into the sea will create a delta.

For a Year 7 lesson, students made the river flood and then altered conditions to prevent flooding from occurring. During this process they took pictures with a digital camera to help them describe and explain what was taking place. The images are then used for a PowerPoint presentation in which pupils explain how the flooding can be prevented. Noel says it is more fruitful than having pupils draw diagrams and helps them understand the concepts.

Mapping is a key part of geography, but Noel considers traditional activities such as colouring them in “an outrageous waste of time”. There are now software programs that allow this to be done quickly on screen, leaving more time for higher-level activities.

Programmes such as Microsoft’s MapPoint, for example, allow data from a spreadsheet to be simply plotted on a map. A teacher can take data on, say, murders in a city, plot the details using a relevant software programme, and a compelling lesson emerges.

Perhaps the single most valuable ICT resource available to geography teachers is the internet, and Noel makes good use of it.

One of the main features of the geography department’s website is that it showcases students’ work, giving assignments a life beyond the dusty cupboard that they would otherwise be relegated to.

Among them are plate tectonics animations from Year 9, an investigation by Year 10 into access for the disabled on London’s South Bank and, one Noel was particularly impressed with, an A-level project comparing the type of street work found in south-east Asian cities with their level of development.

He says posting work on the site demonstrates that geography projects can be about much more than “pulling pebbles from rivers”.

The website won the secondary category in the Learners’ Award of last year’s school and college website awards from the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta). The judges called it an “excellent showcase of work” where pupils had used ICT creatively and were fully engaged in topics. One commented: “The site is both engaging and encouraging, making the audience want to discover further.”

One section particularly commended was the Unfair Trade site, which is described as “a forum for young people to consider and discuss the human issues surrounding global trade”.

Noel set up the site about 18 months ago as a place where students could express their views. “It gives people outside the school a chance to see what children think about something,” he says. “Usually they only get a collection of links on a school website, but they really want to see pupils’ work, their poems and pictures.”

Unfair Trade is largely maintained by students and is a place where homework writing tasks can be posted. Noel reports that pupils like to have their work published and parents enjoy being able to read it.

Despite Hampstead School’s status as a technology college, the geography department is far from over-flowing with computers. Noel’s technology cache includes some personal digital assistants (Palm Pilots, for example) for collecting data, a projector and a PC. “You can do a lot with these tools,” he says.

Noel works closely with the school’s ICT co-ordinator Phil Taylor to make the internet and technology a key part of teaching and “provide inspiration for students”. His approach may well help many other geography teachers do the same.

Hampstead School www.geography.ndo.co.uk

Unfair Trade www.unfairtrade.co.uk

Becta awards www.becta.org.uk

PhotoJam: a software package that can be use to mix image with soundwww.shockwave.comswhelpphotojam_faq.html