Dr Paula Owens FRGS

Pleased to announce a Silver Award from @The_GA for our book 'Teaching Primary Geography'. 🌍 #primaryteacher #geographyteacher Written with @StephenScoffham & published by wonderfully supportive @BloomsburyEd this 2nd revised edition will help you plan & teach. 🌏

Why are you looking down here? The good stuff’s in the video #darkwave #gothmusic #gothmusicreccomendation #darkwavegoth #gothaesthetic

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

Following ongoing issues of illegally dumped waste at an SSSI #Sheppey & the bio-hazardous waste, laboratory test vials, washed up along the shoreline, what is @EnvAgency planning? Counted 23 test tubes today in a short space, 100s more at source. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

A strong domestic, clean, safe, non polluting water industry is vital not only for our economy but the very existence of humanity itself, every bill player, customer, voter, every resident of my street, your street, the next street over. That’s why we’re introducing a Bill... ah, no, sorry, wrong industry... 🤔

Free guidance to download from @OrdnanceSurvey on planning your primary curriculum with #maps and #map work in mind. Underpinned by research & includes tables on #progression. #geographyteacher ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/reso…

Some free resources for #mapping & #fieldwork activity in primary - underpinned with research & teacher notes. #geographyteacher rgs.org/schools/resour…

Thank you to the lovely helpful conductor on the 14:51 delayed service from Llandovery to Swansea today who made sure we got our connection and kept us all updated. @tfwrail

🔥🔥BOOM🔥🔥 This is the moment 100,000 people added their voice to the demand for a referendum on who owns our water. The government now has to consider it for a parliamentary debate. Please sign and share the petition. Make it impossible for them to refuse a debate: vist.ly/42eq6

You’re absolute heroes each and everyone of you. 99,019 signatures, who’s going to number 100,00?

youtu.be/nHvBaSy4KpU We are pleased to share our latest webinar! GeogLive! 32 #fieldwork #primary @The_GA @SteveBraceGeog @JuliaTanner18 @MackintoshJulia @Primageographer

If you want a practical example of why this fund is bullshit, I have one from the River Roding. The Roding has billions of litres of sewage entering it illegally every year & the EA has refused to prosecute a single one. Separately, our volunteer River charity has been campaigning to restore the channel of the river through Ilford golf course & create a wetland. A large river charity (who will remain nameless) told us they could help us get funding for the restoration: great, we thought. They were awarded tens of thousands of pounds from the water company fine fund & instead of actually restoring the river, they spent it (without consulting us) on staff time & consultant costs to produce a *report* about restoring the river. This report will then sit on a shelf somewhere and meanwhile the sewage still illegally enters the river & the river channel is still not restored. Our volunteers were forced to give up their free time & rely on local donations (a fraction of the amount spent on the report) to begin the restoration work as best we could ourselves. The system is utterly broken and our rivers are paying the price.

@BlencathraTim @FieldStudiesC @glocky9 @AireyAndy @fellranger1 @Hazel_Bank @Mounta1n_Mike @RathboneKeswick @Pastpreservers @VisitEden @SueTownsend3 @Pro_Geographer @PeteBarron2 @PaulKingstonITV @EdenSwimmer Gorgeous!

First visit up the Glenderaterra valley #LakeDistrict since I retired from @FieldStudiesC 2022 and 21 years since I went up with a school group 2005 ! Tempus fugit 😆 Forgot how peaceful it was ! @glocky9 @AireyAndy @fellranger1 @Hazel_Bank mostly on blencathratim.bsky.social 👍

@Map_Addict @GeogShanique @RobboGeog Congratulations both 🥳👏👏

So happy that @GeogShanique and I won this award as it cements our time together in Istanbul and now we are both in different countries in South America and thank you to @RobboGeog for collecting it on our behalf!

Thank you @LNER for a smooth trip into London tonight. On time. Clean and comfortable, lovely happy bubbly staff and great food. It’s certainly perked up a long travel route today.

@TPExpressTrains Thank you Chloe

If you're travelling on our Class 185 services, First Class with be located in either carriage C or carriage G, if this service was running with six carriages catering may of been located in the first three carriages. If you would like to log a formal complaint regarding this you can do so here: railhelp.co.uk/tpexpress/make… ^Chloe

@TPExpressTrains hello are you not having any snacks available on the current train to Doncaster? Just arrived Sheffield and paid extra for 1st to get food - nothing? I had to move carriages when I was all set up to get work done too - can you shed any light please?

@TPExpressTrains Manchester to Cleethorpes - I got in at Manchester last coach with a 1st class ticket but no sign of food or drink then we were asked to move to from carriages - they had food! I saw trolley get off at Sheffield - not even a cuppa.

@Primageographer Hi Paula, which service are you travelling on please? ^Chloe

It is almost unbelievable that the government is on the brink of allowing the water companies to scam the British people *once again* by letting them get away with serious criminal offences without any actual plan & commitments for fixing illegal outfalls. I will use one of the most polluting outfalls on the Roding to illustrate why this is a terrible idea. The aptly named ‘Cascades’ combined sewer overflow (CSO) discharges almost every time it rains (even lightly) for more than a few hours. It discharges more than 400 hours per year, the majority of which hours of spilling are completely illegal. Worst of all, my testing of the outfall over the past year has shown that the volume (over 80 litres a second) and concentration (up to 50ppm ammonia) means this CSO is highly damaging, effectively turning the whole river into a sewer for over half a mile downstream. What will be the effect of letting Thames Water off fines for this illegal outfall? 🧵

Fly-tipping = serious illegal offence & householders whose rubbish is tipped in this way often traced & held accountable. Surely if we pay polluting water companies to dispose of sewage & know they pollute we are complicit? Grounds to not pay for sewage bill? @Feargal_Sharkey

“Sewage pollution is at record levels, companies are staggering under debts of £60bn accrued in part to pay shareholder dividends of £78bn and infrastructure has been left to rot.” theguardian.com/environment/20…