OllieBray.com

Lets Make Things! - Using Technology to Innovate in STEM: Big Shot Camera (#BigShotCamera)

The ‘Big Shot’ Camera looks very interesting.

It is a camera that you buy on bits and then have to make before you can use it. The idea behind it is to show children how things actually work and not just what they can be used for.

It has been well thought out as an educational product and comes with an interactive guide that explains all the science behind the different camera components.

I like the philosophy of the Big Shot cameras creator Prof Shree Nayar as well, ‘It's about getting kids' hands dirty. In an age when software rules I want kids to know how to build hardware”.

They are not available in the UK yet but I think I’ll be getting one to have a play with when they do appear on this side of the pond.

Good article on the BBC website on the Big Shot as well.

My other STEM 'Lets Make Things' Technology Posts here.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Summer 2012 in the Alps [Newspaper Article]

In the summer I was asked by my pal Clive Burgess if I would go with him to the Alps and help train a couple of guys to climb Mt Blanc for a local Dorset charity. They hadn’t been on crampons before, didn’t know one end of a rope from the other and both sported long term injuries from a lifetime on the rugby field. I was also recovering from my shoulder operation, hadn’t trained for months, let alone had a rucksack on my back. 

The whole idea sounded crazy – so I obviously agreed to the trip!

Anyway, we had a great week in the Alps introducing the basics of Alpinism from Crevasse Rescue to navigating our way out of the Chamonix Micro-Brewery! In the end we were rained off our summit attempt – but I can honestly say I had one of the best weeks in the Alps with my new friends. It was great fun and Al and Conrad were great company on the mountain. hey also raised a lot of money for charity.

Anyway, a report of the trip (written in the normal Clive Burgess flair) appeared in the Dorset Evening Echo on Thursday, for anyone who might be interested….

I've also got a few photos of the trip over on my Flickr Page. My favorite photo is the one below - taken from a funny angle of Conrad laying on the glacier! It took us ages to set up - as people kept walking past and ruining the shot! 

 

Education Resources to help teach the 2010 Winter Olympics (9 of 10): Using images (flickr)

 

I have spoken about flickr lots of times and what great resource it is for finding images and bringing a bit of wonder and magic into the classroom. If you have not seen my Flickr lesson starter activity, have a look at it here - it will be the quickest (10 secs) inspiring multi-media resource you ever create!

Anyway, there is a section on flickr called The Commons.

The aims of the commons project are:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

A quick search of the commons on flickr for 'Winter Sports' brings up some fantastic historical photography of people getting out and about enjoying winter. There is huge scope to use these uses photographs not only to inspire but also to discuss how people, clothing, equipment and even the weather has changed over time.

Have a look at some of the great pictures available below:

Creating Classroom Comics

Regular readers of this website will no that I have a real passion for the use of comics and graphic novels in the classroom. My favorite free on-line comic creation tools at the moment are Comic Brush and Pixton.

Comic Brush (www.comicbrush.com) is a bit like a free version of Comic Life and it allows you to make on-line comics for the iPhone / iPod, comic strips and full length comics. It is easy to use and you can either insert your own pictures into the comic strip or download an art pack (small charge) or do a bit of both. The art packs are great as they allow you to introduce licensed characters / artwork such Judge Dread or manga into your comics.

Here is an example of a comic brush comic that I made quickly about the recent Handheld Learning 2009 Conference. All the pictures I have used in the comic were taken by James Clay.

(click on the image to make it bigger)

Pixton (www.pixton.com) is equally as good but serves a different purpose. With Pixton you can really develop the fine detail of a character right down to facial expression and gestures. Pixton is free to use but you can also pay for an education license that gives the teacher more control over student accounts.

Here is a quick example of a pixton comic that I used recently to set some tasks at a recent Learning and Teaching Scotland whole staff event.

The problem is despite these tools being free they may be blocked by some local education authorities and they rely on a reasonable bandwidth in order for them to work properly.

As a result I like to remind teachers that you can actually produce fairly good comics in PowerPoint. I recently produced an Innovative Teacher InnoVid on the subject which some people may find interesting (version embeded below).

You can find out more information about InnoVids here.

And if thats not enough comic stuff for you you could also have a look at these 100 tips, tools and resources for teachers.

PhotoSketch

I really have no idea how this works – but it looks very impressive!

PhotoSketch (link may not be working) is a program that has been developed by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. It transforms basic stick-figure drawings into a photograph.

There is a website to allow people to experiement with software but it looks like its still crashed under the volume of traffic!

The short video below explains it all a lot better than I could

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Melting men: a nice little lesson starter on climate change

I can’t remember who I picked this link up from (probably @geoblogs?) but I really liked these pictures and the on-line article in the Daily Mail over the weekend. The pictures could easily be used in class as a good starter activity or geographical mystery.

A bit of information about the project below:

A thousand miniature people have slowly melted away in a Berlin square in an effort to draw attention to melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica.

Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo carved the figures out of ice and placed them on steps in the central Gendarmenmarkt square where they began to melt within about half an hour.

The installation, Melting Men, was meant to spotlight the World Wildlife Fund's warning that melting ice could possibly cause levels to rise more than 3.3 ft by 2100.

The group warns that the warming of the Arctic will change weather in different parts of the world and increase the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Since 2005, Azevedo has been setting up her Melting Men in various countries around the world. Although originally intended as a critic of the role of monuments in cities, environmentalists around the world are adopting her work as climate change art.

Read more full article here.

PicFinder and Scotlands Digital Archive

If you are looking for images for the classroom or for a presentation then you might find picfindr.com a useful site to keep in your social bookmarks. It is particularly useful if you are looking for images for commercial purposes.

PicFindr.com searches the Internet for stock photography that is completely free to use commercially. It’s worth having a quick look.

Another site that I was reminded about recently is the digital archive for the National Library of Scotland. There are some fantastic images here (particularly the historical ones) that could be used within classroom resources and research.

The archive also contains photographs of important documents and historic maps. I found this 1 inch to 1 mile 1926 Ordnance Survey Map of Islay – now I’ll have to study it to see if I can find any extra distilleries!

Microsoft Deep Zoom – Hard Rock Café Example

During Martin Bean’s keynote presentation at the NAACE 2009 Strategic Conference one of the new technologies that was demonstrated was Deep Zoom. I’ve mentioned Deep Zoom before in relation to my recent visit to the UK Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum in Reading.

The Hard Rock Café collection of music memorabilia was used as an example.

Here is a step by step walk through of what happened. There is also a video at the bottom of the post.

1) The demonstration stated zoomed in on Paul McCartney’s signature:

2) Then they zoomed out to reveal that the signature was actually a small piece of detail on the bottom of some Beatles “Bobb’n Head” Dolls (apparently one of the most sought after items of Beatles memorabilia – particularly if Ringo’s drumsticks are in tacked!).

3) Then they zoomed out again to reveal that the dolls were actually a picture in a shop keepers window, where some of the original Beatles outfits were stored.

4) Then they zoomed out again to reveal that  outfits were actually a photograph in a HardRock Café.

5) Then they zoomed out to reveal that the Hard Rock Cafe picture was just one tile of a 4×4 collage.

6) Then they zoomed out to reveal that the 4 x 4 collage was actually a stamp on an envelope to a letter from Sir Paul McCartney to Sgt. Buddy Dresner.

7) Then they zoomed out to reveal that the envelope was part of a larger collection containing the actual letter between McCartney and Dresner.

8) Then they zoomed out to reveal that the letter was only one part of the largest music collection in the world owned by the Hard Rock Café.

I’ve made a quick video of the sequence below (Blip TV Video embedded below).

 

Impressive Stuff that certainly demonstrates the wow factor. James Kent has used Deep Zoom to teach about the 2004 Asian Tsunami – but I wonder if there are any other good examples of it being used in education?

One Year in 40 Seconds

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

I thought that this was a nice little animation showing how the world changes outside your window over the course of a year. A photograph was taken every day and then spliced together to play as a movie with some sound, to reflect the seasons, inserted over the top of the film.

It would be a nice idea for a class to do this. No only would it be a nice memento for the children but it would also provide a wealth of cross curricular links such as ICT and place. It would be really nice if a number of different schools across the globe could photograph their year and then up-load their movies to play in a Google Map. This would add an extra international dimension and also inspire discussion about seasons and location.

Movie from: fubiz

Great Lesson Starter for any subject using Flickr

I mentioned this excellent lesson starter in my recent TESS Article and have shown it to loads of teachers around the country over the past few months. It is non-subject specific, its quick, has huge impact and provides and excellent context for discussion.

In order for it to work you need reasonable Internet access, a data projector, access to flickr and a willingness to take a risk. The risk, in my opinion, is not that great – you just have to be prepared not to pre-moderate the flickr images. If anything inappropriate comes I just make this part of the learning.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to flickr – www.flickr.com

2. In the search box type in what your lesson is about or what you want to generate discussion about (eg: triangles, Roald Dahl, cakes, glaciers, hockey, world war two, chemicals, Vincent  VanGogh etc…). Click on search.

3. Flickr returns hundreds of user generated photos / content. You can have a quick scan through to see if you think it is appropriate content or not.

4. Then click on slideshow.

5. Flickr turns all the photographs into a slide show that you can show as the class is coming in, to introduce a topic or to generate discussion.

6. There are no copyright issues as all you are doing is technically browsing the flickr website – the users of the site want you to see their photos!

The below video shows me generating a lesson starter for a lesson on glaciers. As you will see from the video it hardly takes any time at all.