OllieBray.com

Our Story in 2 mins... [great video for History and Big History Teachers]

I really liked this video that was made by a High School Student as a piece of project work.

 

It uses images played in fast succession to re-tell our history. From stars and galaxy's, to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the creation of Super Mario.

 

Made me think it might be quite good for teachers who are considering using the Big History Curriculum as part of their school curriculum developments. 

 

What would you do if money was no object? [Video] [Assembly]

What would you do if money was no object? This little video is certainly worth 3 minutes of your time as it describes one of life's great philosophical battles - do you 'live to work' or 'work to live' OR is there a '3rd option' for most people...

 

Good for assembly, citizenship classes or just making you think on a Wednesday morning!

Thanks to Al Humphreys for the link.

 

 

In a world of 7 billion people: who is the most 'typical'?

This is a great little video from National Geographic as part of their Population 7 Billion series. It suggests that the most typical person on the Earth is right handed, earns less than $12, 000 a year, has a mobile phone, does not have a bank account, is male, 28 and Han Chinese.

Researchers than averages 190, 000 photos of people around this age and in this ethnic group to create an image of the worlds most typical person. Here they are…

Really, fascinating stuff great for teaching geography, modern studies, global citizenship and population issues.

The video then goes to challenge what we mean by ‘typical’ and gets the point across nicely that there is really no such thing as typical and typical changes and evolves all of the time.

I’ve embedded the video below:

What a shame that some schools still block YouTube preventing us from showing this rich learning material to children.

The Bank Holiday Britain Blog - a great resource to support cultural geography [#geographyteacher]

Alan Parkinson (Geographical Association) recommended the ‘Bank Holiday Britain’ Blog to me and I have been following it ever since.

Its a photo journal of some great pictures (mostly from Scotland) which often show the quirkiness of life, UK culture and society.

My favorite recent image was posted on 30^th August and titled ‘Building Blocks’ and was taken in Pink Lane, Newcastle.

There are lots of ways the ‘Bank Holiday Britain’ Blog could be used with a class.

For example the urban culture of the pictures could be explored, you could discuss what the picture is of and what is it trying to represent you could even try geo-locating the images.

A great resource to spice up your settlement unit and teach a little cultural geography!

TakingIT Global

I finally got round to reading my August / Sepetember copy of the GTCS Teaching Scotland Magazine today. I was deligted to see a piture of my good friend Mandeep Atwel on the Microsoft feature on page 23 talking about TakingITGlobal (who she now works full time for).

TakingITGlobal.org is a social network that connects people (aged 13 - 30 and their teachers) to the global issues that affect us all. It enables a collaborative learning community which provides young people with access to global opportunities, cross-cultural connections and meaningful participation in decision-making.

If you have not heard of TakingITGlobal.org there website is worth checking out as it offers awide range of opertunities to support Global Citizenship Education.

You can read an online version of the GTCS article here on the Teaching Scotland website.

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (5 of 8): Activities with purpose - Open Street Map and Microsoft Photosynth

This is the fifth of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional Events.

I think that all outdoor learning should have a purpose otherwise it is just ‘outdoor’ (isn’t it?). During my presentation at the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events I talked a lot about purpose including:

• Learning new skills and reflecting on what you have learnt
• Overcoming physical challenge and understanding progression
• Facing your fears and sharing this with others
• Collecting scientific data and publishing your results to a wide audience
• To complete a national accreditation award eg: John Muir or Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Geocashing

I also talked in detail about two other technologies that could add purpose to outdoor journeys.

These were:

1) Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Maps are created using data from portable GPS devices, aerial photography, other free sources or simply from local knowledge. Both rendered images and the vector graphics are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Again, children gathering real data to support global collaboration projects like this provides real purpose for students work. One of the most impressive up-dates of OpenStreetMap ever was after the Hati earthquake.

Globally, after the earthquake, hundreds of people collaborated to produce a map of the island using satellite imagery that could then be used by the rescue services. Just have a look at the video below.

OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

2) Microsoft Photosynth

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos. Its great for outdoor learning because lots of children can take a picture of a landscape or feature and then when you get back to class the software can turn it into a 3D object.

For example all of these photographs below of the view of the River Clyde....

Become a stiched 3D panorama (Silverlight plugin required):

This can be used to develop collaboration (eg: combining childrens photographs when you get back to school), the objects can also be used for reflective purposes and you can even geo-locate photosynths in Bing Maps to give real audience for students work.

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (4 of 5): Augmented reality combined with Facial Recognition

This is a fourth of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinions and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.

The fourth technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is augmented or layar technology when it is combined with facial recognition. I first talked about this in my Keynote to the Holyrood Internet Safety Conference in February 2010. Let me explain my thinking.

Augmented reality (or at least my understanding of it) is a way that we can lay virtual data or images on top of real images. It has been around for years but again has only recently become more robust and cost effective. I mentioned augmented reality recently in a post about how such technology may allow relatively unskilled people to easily do the jobs of people who currently need to be skilled.

Have a look at the BMW Research Concept Video (YouTube Video below) to see what I mean:


I think that this type of technology may be particularly appealing for some industries as it could be more cost effective but also safer and less of a risk for employees.

We are still a little way off Augmented Reality glasses – this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist (they do!) they are just a little bit expensive at the moment and normally have to be plugged into a computer to work robustly.

However many people have an augmented reality viewer already in their pocket – their mobile phone (a recurring theme of this mini series!).

Modem smart phones know exactly where they are because they have GPS in them. They know which way they are facing because they have an accelerometer and / or digital compass in them. They also have a camera and large viewing screen so you can easily see the world though them. Finally, as long as you have a 3G signal most modern smart phones are constantly connected to the Internet – making them very powerful mini computers.

There are already lots of augmented reality / layer apps available for the iPhone and for the android platform. The new Android commercial shows some of the possibilities of this technology (YouTube clip below).


The potential is huge. Imagine walking down the high street and you are looking for somewhere to eat, you walk past a restaurant, hold up your phone to the restaurant and the latest customer reviews appear around it.  Or, you go on a history field trip to a famous battle field and by holding up your phone you can actually see a re-enactment of the battle take place. Or, what about if you visited and extinct volcano (such as Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh) and you hold up your phone to see the geological information about the volcano or even what it might have looked at millions of years ago.

The potential for augmented reality in gaming is also huge. As part of out work at Learning and Teaching Scotland we have already put Sony Eye Pets for the Play Station 3 into a number of Early Years establishments (more about this in a separate post) and also have Invizimals and second sight for the PSP ready to go out to some partner schools early next session. The interesting thing about all of these games is that they use the ‘real world’ as the backdrop for immersive game play.

I’m convinced that these ‘real world’ augmented games will be the big thing of 2011 – 2012 and devices like the Parrot AR Helicopter will add to this new phase of game play. The Parrot helicopter is a hover helicopter with two cameras on it so that you can see what the helicopter sees. The amazing thing about the Parrot helicopter is that you control it over WiFi with your iPhone (and probably other devices as well).


All of these applications are interesting but the real point of my post is to think about what will happen when you combine augmented reality technology with facial recognition software.

Facial recognition software has been around for years and just like all technologies its got better and cheaper over the last few years as computing power has increased. If you’re a mac user facial recognition has been built into the last few versions of iPhone (that ships with all apple computers).

Google image search also now includes an option to search for just faces and Google Picassa allows you to do the same thing with your own photos that you have up-loaded.

In fact Google has had a real interest in facial recognition for years – this is one of the reasons why they bought Neven Vision back in 2006.

Now lets take all the parts and add them together to think about what will be possible in the not to distant future.

• There are lots of people globally up-load pictures of themselves to the Internet, these pictures are often associated and tagged with the persons first and last name.

• There are also a number of websites that allow web users to aggregate all of their social content to one place (Google Profile and Facebook are both good examples of this).

• There are already websites that can build a profile of you from an email address, depending on what you have published about yourself on-line. If you don’t believe me check out spokeo – it scares me!

Also, in the UK (and probably other parts of the world as well) unless you are ex-directory (which we recommend all teachers are) then your address and phone number (including your mobile phone number) are all stored online.

What is my point? Well, very soon you will be able to run an App on your phone , hold it up to a group of people in a room and facial recognition software will be able to recognize their face (cross checked against images that they have on-line) and augmented around the face on the phone screen will be links to the persons likely on-line presence. This will probably include things like Facebook profile, Slideshare account, Flickr page, newspaper reports, LinkedIN profile etc…

The data displayed might also include links to their home address and / or phone number. The App will be able to make educated guesses about some of these things because it will know where it is (eg: its geo-sensitive). For example, just because there are tens of ‘Ollie Bray’s’ living in the UK there is only one (to my knowledge) living in the Edinburgh / Lothian region of Scotland.

Now here is the really interesting thing, this fictitious App that I am describing relies on their being a picture of you on the Internet and then linking data to other on-line sources. When I describe this to people the first reaction I often get is, ‘thank goodness there are no pictures of me on-line’. Of course, these reactions are normally from people who don’t actually have a clue if they have pictures of themselves on-line or not. What they mean is that they haven’t put any pictures of themselves on-line but that doesn’t mean that other people haven’t. You see privacy doesn’t really exist anymore (I’ll come back to this in a separate post).

The TAT Augmented Reality App concept gives a pretty good demonstration of how this might actually work (YouTube Video below).


Of course all of this is fictitious at the moment, but all of the peaces are in place so it won’t be long (I think 12 – 24 months maybe less?). In fact MIT already have a working prototype.


So what does this mean for schools and education? A few things I think.

First of all, more than ever, we need to make sure that we educate our children and young people about what they put on-line. This has to include very young children (I’m talking from 3-11 year olds) and most importantly the teachers that care for them. For far to long we have concentrated our efforts surrounding the Internet safety and responsible use agenda on children that are already too old to really have any worthwhile impact. In short, rightly or wrongly we have been far to reactive and now with the technologies like I have described above just around the corner we need to be far more pro-active to ensure our children remain safe and secure.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think we can stop the above. In fact I think there will be a whole generation of Young People who tick the box (or just ignore the box) on their social networking profile and volunteer their data to be given away in the in the way I have described above.

What ever we do we need to make sure that we raise awareness for both children and education professionals.

What do you think?

Little Treasures Nursery – the plastic bottle greenhouse!

I was out at Little Treasures Nursery in North Lanarkshire a few weeks ago looking at some good practice in ICT that was going on in this wonderful learning environment.

During my visit I couldn’t help but notice the greenhouse that the staff, children and parents had built.

From a distance you might think it looked a bit flimsy….

But when you got close up and finally inside you could see that it had been constructed by hundreds of recycled plastic bottles. The children were able to describe in detail to me how they had built it and also what they were growing inside.

Hopefully, I’ll be invited back when all the vegetables have grown a little bit more!

You think of the landscape story - the BBC will film it for you... [competition]

Fed up of boring geography TV programmes? Well, If you teach in a secondary school in Scotland here is a chance to liven up your social subjects timetable over the next few weeks.

BBC LEARNING SCOTLAND wants your ideas for a short film to tell the story about your local landscape.

And if your idea is selected you'll win a development workshop for your school as well as a BBC director and crew to film your story.

It doesn't matter if your landscape story is historical or modern, pure geography or a bit social-political and the BBC want to hear from you! and so do I because I'm judgeing the entries!

The process is easy...

• First of all pick your story.

• Then work out what everyone needs to see in your short 10 min film and the order in which you want them to see it (and why).

• Finally, in no more than 300 words, write up your brilliant idea on the BBC entry form and get your teacher to email it in.

The closing date is the May 25th, 2010 and we hope to be out filming in the summer holidays.

Everything you need is below and more information over on BBC Scotland Learning Website

• Entry form
• Note for staff
• Print this flyer
• Terms and conditions

Reflections from the 2010 #EducationShow (10 of 10) – Innovation Ally

This is the last in a series of ten posts about my recent visit to the 2010 Education Show in Birmingham. They document some of the products that I saw, liked and enjoyed from the exhibition.

Innovation Ally was a new feature of the 2010 Education show and one of the parts I was most looking forward to seeing and exploring some of the more creative products on offer. Both Right Angle Events and Education Harbour who I have written about previously were found within Innovation Ally.

It was nice to see two Scottish companies in Innovation Ally these were The Tree of Knowledge and also Do-Be ltd. Both companies, amongst other things, offer training for UK schools and wide variety of other products.

Two other companies that caught my attention were Kites for Schools (because they were giving away free kites) and Rapid English. I’ll need to explore the Rapid English product in more detail but there statistics in improve literacy rates in young people looked very impressive.

With the exceptions of the above, I was actually a little bit disappointed with Innovation Ally… do I miss something I would have looked at in more detail?