Using police.uk maps in a geography lesson

I have provided a lesson plan which has got some ideas on how to use the police.uk site in a geography lesson.

Here is a variety of other uses and ideas.

1. Get the uses from the Police themselves. On the site it will provide you with the police team in that local area searched from the home page which asks you for a post code or the place name. This could be as an introduction to the use of police.uk OR to demonstrate the geography skill of your classes get the students to demonstrate all the uses they have found and how they use it. Then evaluate this with how the Police use it. Students come show where they would station the offices in that area and compare this with where the Police actually locate them.

2. Field visit! When you look at the Police map they show you the level of crime at street level. However when I went on street view for the area I was interested low and behold the street view was not available for that street or the other 2 worst affected! TYPICAL. So how about getting the students to visit those sites and to analyse why that site is affected by crime and to take pictures to create their own in class street view of crime as a display!

3. Get students to update the 2011 police.uk site to incorporate the line graphs that the 2010 version had! http://maps.police.uk/ This will aid students to develop key geographical skills essential in geography. Students could then examine the 2 datas and evaluate the benefits/positives and costs/negatives of each map.

4. Students could analyse to see if trends appear. E.g. is one area only impacted by car crime, robbery, burglary etc. To aid students with this they could look at the mapzone GIS idea that Police use. Students could do a GIS project wit the data they have.

5. students examine the social media that their local force has that is linked to the police.uk site. E.g. Twitter, Facebook, youtube. The information that the social media sites contain is for the current month the maps are based on the previous month. Students can then on a google base map label the crimes in the current month and then evaluate this with the previous 3 months. Is crime getting worse or better?

police_uk_lesson_plan.doc Download this file