If you have not seen the video it is worth watching. It was produced about 14 months ago and its interesting to see how many of the ideas in the video have already started to become reality, how many of the ideas will never become reality (because we have already found better solutions) and how many of the ideas that I want to become reality very quickly!
Ray then provided a more detailed overview of some of parts of the video. He also talked about some of the other things that have been built as concept models in Microsoft Research Labs.
These included:
MS Soap(I’ve not heard about this for a while) but I thought it was a pretty good idea when it was first rumored in 2006. Basically it’s a mouse that you can use to control a computer wall from anywhere in the room with a high degree of accuracy.
Round Screens (Microsoft Sphere) I like the idea of both rounded screen and surface computers because I think they encourage collaboration. But they still need to reach an appropriate price point for schools and be developed along with pedagogy.
Video Walls again been around for a while. I would love to see some of this technology in schools. For example, imagine a classroom that you could make to look like the rainforest if you were studying the Amazon.
Touch sensitive phone but on the back of the device so you can always see what you are looking at. In interesting idea but I’m not sure how it will catch on in a device as small as a phone – I think that your hand holding the phone might get in the way?
Microsoft Kinnectwas the last technology that was mentioned – again I just think that this has huge potential for education.
Anyway, I enjoyed Rays talk and I’m pretty sure he was using PowerPoint Plex for his presentation – it was a pretty slick performance and he handled the questions from the audience really well.
The 7th Microsoft UK Innovative Education Forum is a one-day conference, free of charge to all teachers and educators who wish to attend and will look to address the theme of ‘Connecting Learners, Connecting Teachers.’
This year the Forum is being held at the Hilton Deansgate Hotel in Manchester on the 30th Nov.

In addition, there is also a great range of practical workshops covering areas such as using free software and Web 2.0 technology, games based learning and managing innovation in schools. It is great so see so many friends running workshops!
The Line up is:
Workshop 1 - TakingITGlobal - Mandeep Atwal, TIGed UK
Workshop 2 - Outdoor learning & technology - David Rogers, The Geography Collective
Workshop 3 - From the cloud to the classroom, making innovation stick! - Guy Shearer, Head Teacher, Lodge Park Technology College
Workshop 4 - Creative use of technology in the classroom - Dan Roberts, saltash.net community school
Workshop 5 - Office 2010 in the Classroom – Stuart Ball – Microsoft Partners in Learning
Workshop 6 - Kodu Games based learning - Nicki Maddam, Hartsdown Technology College, Margate
Another thing that is new for the 2010 Microsoft UK Innovative Education Forum is a fringe event on the evening of the 29th November.
During the evening there will be an opportunity to hear from some of the UKs leading teachers in a series of short presentations over a drink or two. At the end of the evening the Microsoft 2010 UK Award-Winning Innovative Educators will be announced. These awards will be for teachers who have submitted projects that illustrate the innovative use of technology to enhance teaching and learning.
I was lucky enough to win an award in 2009 and that led to opportunities to travel to Vienna and to Brazil.
Further information about the event can be found at http://uk.partnersinlearningnetwork.com Remember it is free to attend. But it would also be great to have some Scottish Virtual Classroom Tours Submitted (there were none last year!).
The text is a very comprehensive guide for teenagers (and new computer users) that covers everything from how to spot phishing tactics, to setting up your browser to protect against browser-based exploits, to dealing with cyber-stalking and there is also a useful section on cyber bullying.
It also provides interesting history and real world examples of the harm that can come from security vulnerabilities. Which I am sure will be of interest to computer teachers.
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.
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.
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....
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.
Bing Maps and Google Earth have a massive amount of potential to compliment and develop the outdoor learning experience.
I’m not saying that we should be using virtual worlds like these replace children going outside. Quite the opposite, I am saying that we should use free resources like this to compliment the outdoor experience.
1) Use the real time weather layer in Google Earth of Bing Map Weather App to help encourage children to forecast the weather but also to plan with the children in the build up to your outdoor learning experience.
2) Use the Google Earth Webcam layer or the Bing Maps Webcam App to visit places in advance of your fieldtrip. Or use these layers to visit a place that you are unlikely to be able to visit with a class (eg: Antarctica) and then compare them to a local area that you have visited.
3) Use the Google Earth Ruler tools to measure distance, scale and orientation. Compare what you measure virtually to something that you have really measured in real life. In the UK Farm field size is a great example of this. Get the children to use Google Earth to measure the field sizes in different countries (eg: they are normally quite surprised when they measure the fields of southern Alberta in Canada) and then in small groups go out and measure a field near the school. Just think about what you can do with all this data.
4) You can also use Google Earth and Bing Maps to show an area that you are going to visit to parents before you actually take a group of children there. I recently did this with the parents of the young people that I am taking to Alaska this summer. An equally valuable use of this type of resource is to virtually visit these places after your outdoor experience to help children reflect on their experience and their learning.
5) Finally, along the same sort of theme it is great to use tools like the Bing World Wide Telescope App to compare the stars in the sky that you have seen to the stars in the sky in a different part of the world.
Here is a topical example:
i) Pick a place on the earth
ii) See what the stars would look like above your head and explore the sky
A Microsoft Partners in Learning video of me talking about the original Guitar Hero Transition Project has just popped up in my Google Alerts. I filmed this video for Microsoft after the success of the "Thinking out of the xBox" Guitar Hero Games Based Learning Transition project at the Microsoft World Education Forum in Brazil last November.
This is a third of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinion 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 third technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is on-line translator tools. I first talked about this in my keynote at the Aberdeenshire Glow Champion Event in May 2010. Let me explain my thinking.
Do you recognize this?
It’s a babel fish. You might remember it from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (I still think the original BBC radio show was best…. but I digress!). The babel fish was a fish that you could put into your ear and then when people spoke to you in a different language the fish would translate what ever they said into English (or your first language).
Anyway, software has been around for years that claims to translate between languages. But Google translate is a good example of a piece of free web based software that actually works and it works really well.
For example this is a screenshot of the Microsoft France website:
This is what it looks like when you run it though Google Translate:
It is almost 100% accurate. Now you might be thinking that Microsoft would just re-direct to their UK version of the page. So, I tried it again with an article on Julien Llanas blog that I was interested in reading (but it was in French).
The original article is here:
And the translated article is here:
Now I know that neither of the translations are perfect but they are good enough and they certainly make the text accessible to me as a non-French speaker (and reader!). It is not just Google who have on-line translator tools Bing Translate from Microsoft is also really good!
So where am I going with this? Well Google translate can translate English into 56 other languages (and this number continues to grow). The accuracy of the translations varies depending on the language but I would say that they are all at least 60% accurate. There will be some people that say that, ‘they are only 60% accurate’ but I would say that is still 60% of 56 languages that I couldn’t read or write before… It really is amazing when you think about it – what a tool!
But it doesn’t just stop there. What if you are in a restaurant in Germany and you want to find out what something is on the menu? Well from reading the above we know that you could type it into Google Translate but that takes a bit of time. If you had an Android powered phone you can take a picture of the menu and then using the Google Goggles App select the text on the photograph that you want to translate and Google will do the rest. It is very impressive and very quick.
We have the capacity to speak into a mobile device and for it to turn that into text, we have the capacity to turn the text into a near translation of (currently) 56 different languages, we have had screen reader software for years. How long will it be before I can speak into my mobile in English and you can listen to me in French?
The answer is not long.In fact you can already do it (see video from Microsoft Research Asia below) – its just a bit slow and not as accurate as it could be just yet. But, as I have tried to emphasize throughout this series the technology will get smaller, quicker and cheaper. The important thing about the technology is that as soon as it does become available and robust (6 – 18 months) everyone with a smart phone will have access to it for free.
What’s my point? Well first of all I am not trying to suggest that this will be the end to modern languages teaching in school. I still think there is a place for this and I still think that children should be given the opportunity to learn a different language if they want to. I am sure that some modern language teachers and other educators will agree on this point.
But what I do think we need to be thinking about is how will we explain to children that learning a second language is important?How will we motivate them when they can just pick up their phone and translate their own spoken word into a number of different languages? When does this technology become part of a business education or enterprise course?
Importantly, at what point will we start to use these wonderful tools in school to help get children and young people to not just learn another language but to learn about each other? At what point will we realize that conversation can reduce conflict for future generations and that language is currently a barrier to these important conversations, these important collaborations and probably solving some of the words most difficult problems.
As with the rest of this series – I may well be wrong.
I was involved with some of the beta testing for Office 2010 and I really like the new version of PowerPoint. In particular the way that teachers will be able to create nice looking presentations with a relatively low skills threshold.
Ray Fleming has posted a nice little video of some of the new features over on the Microsoft UK Schools Blog (which also has a nice new design). I have embedded it below – worth a watch to see the sorts of things that it can do (particularly the new drawing features and the way that you can now easily embed video from the web).
This is a second of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinion 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 second technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is voice to text software for mobile devices. I first talked about this in my Learning and Teaching Scotland Literacy Co-coordinators keynote presentation in February 2010. Let me explain my thinking.
If we consider the history of human communication it probably evolved something like this:
We learned to communicate verbally
We developed written language
We developed electronic communication (with a keyboard)
We developed smaller more ubiquitous forms of electronic communication with mobile (keyboard input changed)
And now we are in a situation where mobile devices (computers) can be controlled by voice
Of course, technology manufacturers have been working on software that allows you to speak into a computer and then it turns your voice into text for years. I first started using it properly when I had my first Windows tablet PC back in 2005. I wrote a set of school reports by speaking into the software rather than typing them by hand. It took a long time because the software wasn’t particularly robust at the time – but in the end I eventually achieved my goal.
Speech to text software is not new to education it have been used in special educational needs for many years. The problem in the past with a lot of this software is that it is not always particularly reliable and it can also be very expensive. But like any technology it gets cheaper and more reliable over time.
Now, here is the interesting thing. Android powered mobile phones have voice to text recognition software already built in – this was first live demoed with the Nexus One mobile phone handset. Have a look at the video showing voice input for Android in action below:
Also, Android Powered Mobile phones outsold the iPhone OS in the US during the first quarter of 2010. One of the reasons for this is probably because Android phones are cheaper and they compare very well to the iPhone in terms of performance and functionality.
I am quite sure that we will see a wide new range of Android mobile phones available for Christmas 2010 and all of them will have the built in voice input to text recognition.
So what does this mean? Well, I’m not sure. But I know that very soon whether it is an android powered phone, an iPhone or a Windows phone most smart phones will have the capacity to translate the spoken word to text with a high degree of accuracy (in fact they can already do this).
If we accept that most mobile devices will be smart phones in the not to distant future and we also accept that most young people in Europe, North America, Australia, parts of Asia and a lots of other places in the world have mobile phones. Then we must also accept that it won’t be long until young people realize that they only have to speak into their devices to get them to write for them.
What’s my point – well if you’re a teacher and you currently struggle to get the children in your care to write with a pen or a pencil. Then it is going to be even harder post Christmas 2010 when lots more children have devices like I have described above and will be even less motivated to write with a pen or a pencil.
Technology like 'voice input' adds to the debate of why we get children to write with a pen or pencil in the first place. One of the reasons that we do in the United Kingdom, whether we like it or not, is because that is how we test children at the end of high school. They sit down and do written exams – but why else do we teach the process of writing with a pen or pencil and is this still as important as it once was?
What seems clear to me is that never before in the history of communication during the last 100 years has it been even more important than ever to make sure children have a real grasp of the spoken language. This is one of the reasons why I am delighted that our radical new curriculum in Scotland includes the spoken word as a type of ‘text’. Thank goodness it does as it is the only way, that I can think of, to really future proof language.
As with all of the posts in this series, I could be wrong about the above. I don’t know what the answer is and I don't think we can stop or should even want to stop this evolution in technology. But I do think we should, as educators, be thinking about how technology such as voice to text smart phones may impact on teaching and learning (in both a positive and negative way).
I think this will be a significant paradigm shift in the way children engage with text and we are within 12 months of the tipping point for secondary / high school students and maybe 24 – 36 months away from the tipping point for elementary / primary school children. Teachers and leaders in schools need to be ready embrace change and not
be reactive to it or fight it (you will loose). Soon most children will have one of
these devices and we can't stop it. Things are about to move very quickly, are you, your school and your authority ready?
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