New trends in teaching geography, when pupils can find a lot of geographic data on the Internet and use mobile phone navigation to find their way, are the topic of this year's Summer Geography School in Brno. Experts warn against the opinion that teaching geography is useless in view of the development of modern technologies. Czech experts agree that the development of technology increases the demands on pupils to be able to navigate in the data they receive. However, the form of geography needs to be adapted to this.
"What we need to teach young people is so-called cartographic skills, so that they learn to read maps and make better use of the huge amount of data and information contained in them, which we get thanks to modern technologies," said Vladimír Herber from the Geographical Institute of the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University, which has organised the Summer Geography School in Brno for 30 years. This year, the meeting of geography graduates and students with teachers and people from practice will take place from 23 to 25 August.
"When we started the Summer School in the 1990s, the question was how to fill in the missing information in geography textbooks that did not appear in the previous regime. This was followed by a period when teaching was expanded to include ecology and environmental education. Recently, there has been a fight to keep geography in the curriculum," Herber says. However, he says, the geography helps to know and understand the world in context. Moreover, working with maps develops thinking and imagination, teaches how to read visuals and graphs, and especially how to interpret data.
Teachers' approaches also need to change. "Teaching should not start with the instruction to put away mobile phones, but rather 'class has started, get out your mobile phones', so that students learn to use modern technology to its full potential," Herber stressed. Not only the geography curriculum in primary and secondary schools needs to be adapted, but also the teaching of future teachers. Linking the teaching of future teachers with practice is important. That is why experts from practice are invited to the Summer Geography School to present new ways of using applications in geography education.
Our experts have devised a technique that facilitates the production of nanofibre mask filters. Now, with the help of a grant from the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TAČR), they are verifying how the plasma-treated surface of the filter handles temperature fluctuations, storage and other "pitfalls"...
Researchers from Brno have proposed several existing and approved drugs that could prevent the coronavirus binding to human cells. The drugs were identified while researching proteins using artificial intelligence, which also has the potential to identify new drug structures.
