Geography nuggets - Country Series - North Korea

Here is a little bit about the history and current situation of North Korea. Enjoy. As usual, all videos are uploaded on my website: www.geokid.org

What is North Korea like?

North Korea was not on top of my blogging priorities, but the recent death (December 17) of its leader Kim Jong-il, changed that.

North Korea is a communist country of which very little is known, so when I found this great 15 minutes BBC documentary about it, I thought it would be worth sharing it my readers. I may blog at a different time about the history of this secretive and poor country and how it has become what it is right now. In the meanwhile, I have added a Wikipedia map, to the picture below showing the location of North Korea.
Click on the picture to watch the "interesting" 15 minutes documentary.

Glimpses of real North Korean life behind the facade

Geography nuggets - Country Series - Israel

As part of my Geography education program, I am going to start a series of videos about individual countries. It will not cover things like capital, longest river or highest peak but rather focus on history and current situation of each featured country. With Christmas approaching, it seems appropriate for the first video to talk about Israel, the land where Jesus was born and lived. After all, it is his birth that we celebrate every year on December 25. If Jesus had not been born and impacted so many lives throughout history, this special holiday would not exist on our calendar.
Of course, not everything about a country can be covered in 10 minutes, but I hope my videos will spur your interest to go find out more about places you might not know much about.
In the meanwhile, let me know which countries you would like me to talk about in my future videos and, once you have watched this first one, try to find out in which of the three occupied territories in Palestine is Bethlehem located. Let me know.

Geography nuggets - Where on earth are you? (part 2)

I hope you enjoyed my first video about how to determine our position on the planet earth. This is part 2. It explains a little more about degrees of Latitude and Longitude and their divisions: minutes and seconds.

A future video will cover how GPS devices use and display this information.

What are the coordinates of your city?

Geography nuggets - Where on earth are you? (part 1)

Simple video about how to determine our position on the earth.

What are Latitude and Longitude and how do they work?

The explanation takes a while, if you are not familiar with the subject, so I broke this lesson up in more than one part.

The second part will be uploaded later. Let me know if you have any questions.

7 Billion people - A problem or a blessing?

If you watched or listened to the news in the past month, chances are you have heard about the earth population reaching 7 billion sometime before the end of 2011.

Population is an important aspect of Geography, so for today's blog, I am presenting four very different perspectives about the birth of the 7 billionth person. Click on each picture below to read the articles.

(watch the video embedded halfway down the page in the article)

The BBC video points out that, if all 7 billion people lived in a city with the same density of Paris, we would all fit within the country of France, which is slightly smaller than the state Texas, with room to spare.

The CNN writer, on the other hand, asks the question: What does this mean for the environment?

My hope this Christmas season is that more people will come to realize that every single person on earth is an asset bringing his/her own unique gifts to this world, not just consuming the earth resources.

Here are a few examples: Benjamin Franklin was the 8th child of 17 children his father had.

Celine Dion is the youngest of 14 children. Queen Victoria of England had 9 children.

Wilma Rudolph, who was considered the fastest woman in the world in the 1960s and competed in two Olympic Games, was born prematurely at 4.5 lbs. , the 20th of 21 other brothers and sisters.