OllieBray.com

Flutter - the Quicker Twitter

With all this web 2.0 stuff drifting around the Internet its difficult to stay up to date with it all. This YouTube Video about 'Flutter' made me laugh. (You Tube Video below).

Did You Know - Version 3.0

I like the Did You Know facts and figures - although I'm getting a bit fed up with seeing it at conferences! Here's the latest US version below - its got a few up-dated facts and figures.

Highlights from Teachmeet NE London 2009 (4 of 5) – 2Simple

This is the forth in the series of five posts on my experience from Teachmeet North East London last week.

I’ve written before about 2Simple DIY – this is basically games design software for younger children. Max Wainwright  from 2Simple showed us some of the great content that has been created by Porchester Primary School. Its impressive stuff and its great to see what the young people are capable of imagining and then producing. I really liked Indiana Jones Game that one of the children had made, where you had to explore the inside of a pyramid! And also the Shark Attack game where you were the dolphin.

One of the really nice things about 2DIY is that you can export all the games as an embeddable flash format. This can add real audience to the pupils work – which as we all know is incredibly powerful. You can view / download the children’s games over on the Porchester web site.

Max finished up his presentation by showing us some new software that they have been working on at 2Simple – It included augmented reality to help the children draw and understand 3D shapes. Although it’s only in its alpha stage – I already want a copy!

After all you all know how I love Augmented Reality!

Microsoft Surface in action at Churchend Primary School, Reading

This is a nice little video (you tube) showing some children from Churchend Primary School in Reading using Microsoft Surface for the first time.  One of the reasons that its so interesting is that the classroom teacher is talking honestly about how the technology could be improved for education. You also see the children use the technology for the first time.

What I want to know is has Surface made it into a Scottish School yet? And when are we going to get to try it out in a school north of the border?

Highlights from Teachmeet NE London 2009 (3 of 5) – BBC Learning Open Labs

This is the third in the series of five posts on my experience from Teachmeet North East London last week.

Not only did Leon Cych give me a lift back to my hotel after Teachmeet NE London 2009. But he also gave a cracking presentation on some of the projects he has been working on recently and an advanced look at a couple of websites.

The fist of these was BBC Learning Open Labs which are a portfolio of learning resources and online prototypes. The content is 'open source' which means that everything is free, available for anyone to use and can be modified for non-commercial use. BBC Open Lab is inviting input from teachers, learners, students, developers - anyone with an idea for a learning resource wanting to develop it into a prototype.

Leon showed us a great Mash up that shows a spinning 3D globe and coming out of it are ‘bars’ of information. The ‘bars’ are generated by RSS feeds from the BBC news website. This means that you can quickly look at the globe and see where most of the world news stories are currently coming from.  You can also click on a bar of information and get a summary of the news story.  A great idea, with lots of potential use in the classroom.

The second site that Leon told us about was ICT CPD for free (or www.ictcpd4free.co.uk).

The website is being developed through Naace, the professional association for those interested in advancing education through ICT. A complete set of fully evaluated CPD modules will be available from September 2009.

The modules that will be available include:

• ICT Assessment in Primary Schools
• ICT Assessment in Secondary Schools
• A focus on the ICT knowledge and skills that are required to teach numeracy and literacy within the QCA Primary Framework
• Embedding e-safety into ICT work in school
• Modelling Activities using ICT, Monitoring using ICT
• Using Web 2.0 Visual Learning Collaboration Tools in both the primary and secondary classroom
• ICT Courseware that supports Modern Foreign Languages in Primary Schools
• Ways of developing higher-order thinking skills utilising ICT mind mapping and concept mapping interfaces

I’m assuming that the modules will be available to non-NAACE members as well?

Augmented Reality and Google Earth Buildings

I was trying to keep one of my latest Personal Learning Network discoveries on the QT until the Geographical Associations Conference next week. But as I’ve already shown it to a few people at the Innovative Teachers forum and I also talked about it last week at Teachmeet North East London. So I thought it was about time for a blog post - before Alan beats me to it!

I’ve blogged about Augmented Reality before (and here). I think it has the potential to be the next evolving technology in education. It will also serve to bridge the gap for teachers between the virtual world learning spaces and real world learning spaces. In simple terms, augmented reality turns an augmented reality code into 3D virtual objects. This has huge potential to be used in education.

Anyway, it is now possible to extract some buildings for Google Earth and make them appear right in front of you. I tried it out with a few of the children from MGS just before I left and they couldn’t believe it.

The Augmented Reality viewer uses ARsights that is currently a free download. You need to have a web cam attached for it to work. The better the webcam the better the results. It’s very simple to use – first of all you need to download the AR sights Software, then a placemark (this is basically a bar code) and then you need to pick a 3D model from inside Google Earth. All the instructions are on the AR Sights website.

I’ll let you work out the rest yourself – but here’s a quick screencast (sorry forgot to turn the sound off!) to show how it works. I’ve used the Sydney Opera House as an example.

Even though only some of the 3D buildings are available at the moment in Google Earth – I can already see this free off the shelf resource being used to teach place, compare urban areas, support tourism studies, look at the shape of buildings and for virtual fieldwork. Its very impressive stuff!

Highlights from Teachmeet NE London 2009 (2 of 5) – Tom ‘Teachers TV’ Barrett

This is the second in the series of five posts on my experience from Teachmeet North East London last week. Listening to Tom Barrett speak or reading his blog is always so refreshing - he can only be descried as a legend in the edublogosphere. He is a key part of my personal learning network and completely committed to his school and the children in his care. I have learnt a huge amount from over the past few years.

Tom used Prezi really well for his presentation and you can view his Prezi here. If you have not seen Prezi before its well worth a look. Tom’s presentation was called, ‘Mr Barrett there is glue on my laptop’. The title had real meaning as what time was trying to explain that technology should be embedded into regular classroom practice. Tom gave us a video tour of his room which he described as a ‘regular primary classroom’ the big difference being that ‘technology was always on tap’.

Next Tom showed us some of the work he had been doing with his classes. The first example was using Google Earth to help with story telling. It was based around James and the Giant Peach where the children had to use Google earth to plot their own escape story for the peach. They used Google earth to record their story and also used it as a canvas to write their story as well. Tom has a good write up of this over on his website.

Tom then started to talk about how he uses Delicious as a homepage for all the computers in his class. This is a really great idea. If you don’t already know delicious is a social networking site that allows you to save bookmarks to the Internet. It’s well worth checking out, you can find my delicious links here and I’ve also embedded a great little commoncraft video below to explain how delicious works in a lot better way than I ever could!

 I’ve used delicious with students before for Advanced Higher (A-level) work. But then I was really only encouraging the students to create their own delicious accounts, so they could save bookmarks and if I found a website that I thought would interest them, I could recommend a link to them.

Tom uses Delicious in a different way. Tom’s class’s delicious page is set up as the home page for his class computers. This means if his class are using the class laptops Tom can quickly direct the children towards a link (it’s tagged for maths, science, geography, literacy etc...)  This saves the children from entering complicated URLS and also keeps that more focused on where tom wants them to end up on the Internet. I thought this was a great idea with fantastic potential.

Highlights from Teachmeet NE London 2009 (1 of 5) – Drew Buddie (The Digital Maverick)

This is the first in a series of five posts reflecting on Teachmeet NEL.

It was great to meet Drew Buddie again at Teachmeet NEL 2009. He’s known as the Digital Maverick on Twitter and follows nearly 2500 people and in return over 2800 people follow him! Drew spoke about a number of things but kept coming back to the theme of his personal learning network and how they support him with his work. He also talked about some of the issues surrounding the use of social networking and web 2.0 tools in schools. For example according to the small print you are ment to be 13 or older before you use Voki.

Drew also shared with us a few tools that he likes to use in his classroom. In particular, he is a big Glogster Fan and showed us some excellent ‘glogs’ that his students had created. Glogster is website that also you to create engaging posters and artwork. Drew also told us about Glogetser for Education (I’d not heard of that before) - http://www.glogster.com/edu

Drew summed up his presentation by showing us the Indispensible Tools Wiki. This is a Wiki that he has created by crowd sourcing ideas on indispensible web 2.0 tools from other teachers. Its well worth a look and I’m sure that most people will find something in the list that you have either forgotten about or not heard of before.

Goomoodleikiog: In Plain English

Inspired by those clever people over at the commoncraft show this short paper animation video Goomoodleikieg in Plain English by Leigh Murrel (San Diego, CA) is a great bit of work and would make a good thought piece for staff CPD. The question could be what do you like or dislike about this future scenario for education? For example, I like the way the teacher has embraced new and free technologies to encorage collaboration and group work. I don't like that the teacher gets rid of the posters from the walls in the future scenario!

(You Tube video embedded below)

The Random Activity Generator - now available for the iPhone

When John Davitt initially told me about the Random Activity Generator – I thought it was an excellent idea. Then at BETT 2009 he showed me the alpha version working on his iPhone. Since then I’ve been waiting with eager anticipation to see it released into the Apps Store. John kept telling me it would be next week……months passed! Then yesterday John sent me a tweet letting me know it had been finally released!

The RAG is a great idea with huge potential. It basically generates random activities for you to try with your class. I’ve embedded a video of the demo from the website below so you can see how it works.

 

There are also some flash based learning event generators on John’s Site – including a good one for Geography.