OllieBray.com

Horizonless maps of Manhatten

Mike Coulter sent me this nice little link to ‘Here and There: the horizonless project in Manhattan’. I really liked the maps of Manhattan that they have produced, so I thought I would give it a mention here.

‘Here & There is a project by S&W exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They're intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.’

More information on the idea behind the maps here.

Drawing a graph, creativity and deforestation

I’ve got a long list of blog posting to catch up on...

I can’t remember where I first saw the picture above online? But I just thought at the time it was a lovely example of how satellite imagery and a bit of creative thought could be used to improve a simple pie chart and really illustrate an important message.

On another note, I also came across this aerial photography of the deforestation in Sweden. Isn’t it a funny, but very familiar shape, that the logging trucks have made!

Learning from films

My good old friend Mike Tidd, Curriculum Leader at Cove School, Hampshire had a nice little article in SecEd last month about using Film in Geography. In the article Mike talks about his experiences of using film with his geography classes and also lists some of his favorite geography films.

You can access the full article here.

Mike lists his top ten geography films as:

1. Slumdog Millionaire – Life within shanty towns of Mumbai
2. Brassed Off – Industrial decline in the UK
3. The Day after Tomorrow – Climate change has never been so traumatic

So, what would your top three Geography films be and why? Leave your answers below…

BrainPOP UK tackles Swine Flu

My friends over at BrainPOP UK have been quick off the mark to create this great little education video about Swine Flu, what it is and how you can prevent infection. It also tackles terms such as ‘pandemic,’ and ‘vaccine’.

It’s a great little video to help children understand exactly what Swine Flu is. You can view the video over on the BrainPOP UK Site and also via their YOU Tube Channel.

Nice work  Tim and Moby!

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!

Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum (7of10) – Collaborative Group Work

This is the seventh in a series of ten posts about my experience last week at the 2009 Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna.

As part of the forum we had to work in collaborative groups to produce a piece of work on Vienna. We were encouraged to use as many new and emerging technologies as possible. I had the pleasure of working with a group of enthusiastic Scandinavian teachers and we decided to focus our piece of work on ‘exploring place’ and gave it an overall title of ‘on the move: a city in change’.

As part of our submission we created a number of smaller projects that could be replicated by teachers or children for any place or location. Our work included:

 

1. Eyesight Photostory

 

We created two different photo stories of people walking around the city. We tried to take the pictures at eye level and each picture is part of a bigger journey. We took a picture every eight steps to create the feeling of exploration and flow. We based the idea for this on some of the great work being done by Dan on his Urban Earth project.

 

I would be interesting to expand this theme and idea with children making their own ‘walk to school’ eyesight photostories. One of our other ideas was to take two pictures every eight steps one from an adults and one from a child’s perspective.

 

One of our photostories is embedded below:

 

 

 

2. Photsynth

 

We also took 464 photographs of church that we felt really illustrated the concept of ‘change’. The church looks like it is Italian in origin but from one side it has a real gothic feel. In fact, when viewing the building from different sides it looks like two separate buildings or locations. We thought it was something worth capturing and bringing back to the classroom.

 

I’ve embedded the Photosynth below to see what we mean:

 

(direct link)

 

One very impressive way of viewing a photosyth is to press ‘P’ on your keyboard as this means you can see the 3D model that we created.

 

 

You can also view it on an iPhone / iPodTouch using iSynth and we also embedded it in Windows Live Earth.

 

We thought that children could take photographs of different landmarks, photosynth them and then write or record narrative to support their synth.

 

 

AutoCollage

 

We created an Auto Collage of symbols and signs that we saw in the city. This would be a quick and powerful way for students to present the idea of place.

 

 

Windows Live Earth

 

We also found our church in Windows Live Earth. We were able to take a screen shot of the building.

 

Then using www.bighugelabs.com we transferred the model into a motivational poster.

 

We developed the activity into a cross curricular activity where we used Live Earth to measure the distance between the church and a school in Scotland and also looked at the direction between the two locations.

 

We also used some creative writing to describe what we felt about the building thus combining place, literacy and numeracy.

Regular readers of this website will recognize this as an activity I’ve done before – you can find the previous work here.

 

 

Using Twitter and Wordle to gather information on perception.

 

The final activity we completed was to ask Twitter followers who have been following the conference three words that they felt best described Vienna. We got over 20 responses from all over Europe and the USA. The location of the comments has been plotted on a Live Earth Map.

 

We then imported the responses into wordle to gather information on perspective. The final wordle is shown below. It’s interesting to see how other people perceive Vienna.

 

As a final activity we re-watched the photostory walks and compared the perception Wordle to our own experiences of walking around the city.

 

I really enjoyed working on this other teachers from other countries – it was a great idea to discuss, share and collaborate!

Google Street View comes to Musselburgh

View Larger Map

Google Street View is now available in some of the big cities of the UK including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. The Edinburgh coverage stretches out far enough to include most of Musselburgh – which will be great news for the teachers at MGS.

Streetview is available as a layer in Google maps that can be activated by dragging the orange man from the left hand side of the map over a road in an area that has been photographed for streetview.

Google maps is a really underused resource in the classroom. I had a cover class the other day and the children were learning about Greenfield and Brownfield sites. The material in the textbook (that had been left by the cover teacher) was a little bit dry so I improved by using Google Maps and talking about the Brownfiled site next to the school and the proposed new Tesco’s development and Greenfiled site that has a planning application on it at the other end of town. The children were very engaged because they could see places they new and we fascinated by the detail. Its another good example of teaching lace and local area.

So just to re-cap the layers in Google Maps are:

Maps:

Satellite (note the imagery is before the school was re-built):

Terrain (I’ve also got the Wikipedia and Images layer turned on here):

Streetview:

Deepzoom and Photozoom: Microsoft Live labs in the Classroom

One of the great privileges of my current position is being able to watch talented teachers teach and to share ideas with them. On Monday I was observing a particularly enthusiastic NQT teach about Fairtrade. When I was teaching geography full time this was something I used to really enjoy teaching the children about. In fact I even had a go at teaching the parents a thing or two!

Anyway, as I was observing and learning from the lesson, I started to think about a great Deepzoom Fairtrade activity that could be used for future classes by myself and other people. I had an opportunity to try it out today and the children responded really well to it. It’s sort of based on the hard Rock Café example that I saw at the NAACE Conference in that you zoom out from the picture to revel each stage.

I’ve embedded the Photozoom file at the end of this post and a video showing how to revile the picture. I made the picture using the Deep Zoom Composer which is a powerful and free Microsoft download. Here’s a walk through to explain that every part of the ‘zoom out’ has a story and learning point.

I started zoomed in on the Fairtarde Logo (see the video at the end to find out how). I talked with the class about fairtrrade and the sort of products that carry the Fairtrade Logo.

Then I zoomed out to show the football – discuss with the class why footballs are fairtade and the advantages / disadvantages of buying fairtrade products like this. Do the class know of any celebrities who endorse fair-trade products?

Then zoom out to show the boy kicking the football – I asked the class if they thought this was someone who buys or makes fair-trade products? How could they tell? and why?

Then I zooned out to show the ‘Weymouth and Portland’ postcard. I explained that Weymouth and Portland is Fairtrade town / area of the UK. I asked the class what they thought Fairtrade towns were or if they new of any in Scotland. I also used the Weymouth and Portland to link to the 2012 Olympics.

Then I zoomed out to show the Aberfeldy postcard as well. This was Scotland’s first Fairtrade Town. We discussed the closest Fairtade town to Musselburgh – its Longniddry if you didn’t know.

Then I zoomed out to show the African classroom. I explained that some children in less economically developed counties (LEDC’s) can really benefit from fairtrade as it means their parents get a guarantied price for their crops. In some cases this means that their children can be sent to school. I emphasised that in some African counties primary education is free but secondary education requires payment. I tried to link the education discussion to job prospects etc…

Then I zoomed out to show the PowerPoint slide. We talked about the other direct benefits to the grower of Fairtrade. This included education, microfinance, healthcare, standard of living, sustainability etc…

Then I zoomed out to the school classroom. I linked this to the importance of educating everyone about Fairtrade and ethically traded products.

What do you think? Feedback welcome?

Video of ‘zoom out' below:

Photozoom to use in your class embedded below. NOTE: You will need Silverlight to view it at work / home.

Bill Gates talks about Malaria – a good resource for Higher Geography (and he also talks about what makes a great teacher!)

I’ve been quoting the work of Bill Gates and Gates Foundation for years at my Scottish Association of Geography Teacher student talks on Population and Development and Health.

At the 2009 TED talks Gates gives an excellent presentation on Malaria, with some startling facts. For example, did you know that:

‘There is more money that is put into baldness drugs than into Malaria’

The video is really worth a look if you a re interested in development and health and tropical diseases. One of the best bits of work the Gates Foundation is trying to invest in is the use of bed nets in the less economically developed world. A very simple solution to a complex problem – that can save lives.

I also love the bit where he releases some mosquitoes into the audience and says, ‘it shouldn’t just be poor people that get infected!’

This is a great bit of really interesting and important work.

The second part of the video also talks about some research that that Gates Foundation is involved in which is about, ‘what makes a great teacher’.

This part of the video is also worth a look and Gates makes some really interesting points, including:

• Having a master’s degree does not make you a better teacher
• After three years of teaching most teachers do not improve
• The very best teachers tend to leave the teaching profession
• ‘Work Hard Be Nice’ is Bill’s recommended teaching read
• Great teaching is the key to successful lives and a successful economy

Inspiring stuff and an interesting way to spend your retirement!

 

 

More resources to liven up your Industrial Geography Lessons

Yesterday I posted about some new BBC Industrial Geography programmes that I was involved with. Today, I came across another couple of Industry resources that might be of interest to geography teachers.

The first is a set of 12 photographs of factories from Industrial Japan. I know that lots of Scottish schools still teach Japan in S2 so I’m sure these photographs will be a welcome resource. For an urban landscape they really are interesting, vibrant and wonderfully 'space aged'. You can view all 12 of the photographs here.

The second resource that I came across that might be useful for geography teachers is this ETech Preview: Inside Factory China, An Interview with Andrew Huang.

Andrew talks about how he has taken a new internet appliance (Chumby) through the design and production process. In the interview Andrew talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase.

There are some interesting viewpoints here which would provide a good context for discussion with a Higher of Advanced Higher class.

On the subject of China – BBC Scotland learning also has a great cross curricular China Stories resource on this as well.