My name is Rachael Donnelly. I am currently a sophomore living in State College and attend school at Pennsylvania State University Park. I come from a small town up north called Athens, Pennsylvania. The career I am hoping to have some day is being an elementary school teacher. I am interested in this course because I want to learn more about the physical features of the Earth and the activities of lifeforms, populations, land, and different resources. This course has been recommended to me by a couple of people and I am excited to learn what it’s all about. Some random facts about me are I really enjoy sports and ran my first marathon last year. Last year I was a Business major and decided to change to Education after my second semester. Lastly, I used to have a pet pig named Lucy.

There are a great deal of concepts that can be learned about the geography of our world, but one subject that I find informative and important is visualization. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas. When it comes to learning it can be much easier to have a better understanding of subjects and different concepts when they are in a graphic form or set up so people can virtually see them. Sometime listening to a lecture or having a book full of words in front of you doesn’t exactly help portray the information as well as it should. Some examples of visualizations are maps, videos, charts, diagrams, concept webs, ect. We especially see these used in geography when we are virtually exploring different landforms, calculating different populations through charts and graphs, or trying to identify different areas through map making. Like they say in the Polar Express, “seeing is believing,” and once we get a visual about the stuff happening around us, it really helps to make conclusions about certain ideas that we were unsure about.