OllieBray.com

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)

There is no doubt about it Steve Jobs was a genius. He was a person who could think about things differently and encouraged others around him to do the same.

He was an amazing presenter and has a gift (along with teams of people that he built up around him) of seemingly creating the impossible but in a really simple and easy to understand way.

He will be missed.

The Hive - an very clever idea to save schools money from Bee-IT

 

Have you heard of Groupon? It is a web service that offers you deals on events, products, attractions and days out in your local city or in cities that you are visiting.

It makes its money because it relies on linking people together to ‘bulk buy’ a product or service.

Bryan Plumb and his team at Bee-IT have developed an ingenious idea to transfer the model for education (The Hive). They have linked up with a number of top UK education suppliers to provide products and service to schools at a highly discounted price (some as much as 40% off). The catch is that in order to get the discount you have to have a certain number of schools to ‘opt in’ to the deal.

If you think about it this makes a massive amount of sense. It is better for suppliers to secure bulk deals though a single portal as saves them money by not having to ring, visit or advertise to individual schools. These saving can then be transferred to the individual establishments and creates an efficiency saving for schools.

In the past bulk deals were often available though Local Authorities but as increasingly ICT budgets are devolved to schools (particularly for Academies and Free Schools in England) then unless schools are very-organized they often miss out on bulk purchasing.

Anyway, certainly worth a look and I look forward to watching this idea and service expand over time.

Policy Exchange: The Future of Technology in our Schools [Video]

Yesterday I posted information about the Policy Exchange event on the Future of Technology in our schools (English Schools) that I attended on the 9^th September 2011. 

Leon Cych (Learn for Life and Naace fellow) captured my presentation and I’ve embedded it below:

Leon also captured a number of other presentations from the event. They are all good but the ones that I think are worth a definite watch are:

• Fiona Aubrey Smith - On The changing world of technology in education
• Lord Jim Knight of Weymouth - On Progress, Passion and Positivity
• Peter Twinning of Vital - On What is the impact of ICT?

A full write up of the event appears on Merlin John On-Line.

Culture, Careers, Credibility and CfE: Why Internet Safety and Responsible Use is Everyone’s Responsibility (#ISRU11)

 
All of the keynote presentations from last weeks LTS / Scottish Government Internet Safety and Responsible Use Conference are now up on-line over on the conference website.

These presentations include:

• Adam Ingram, MSP (Minister for Children and Families) - Ministerial Address

• Helen King (Head of Education at CEOP) - Protecting young people on-line

• Josie Fraser (Leicester City Council) - Digital Identity and Young People (this is a must watch presentation)

My own presentation was titled Culture, Careers, Credibility and CfE: Why Internet Safety and Responsible Use is Everyone’s Responsibility. I've embedded it below for interest and as always would welcome any feedback.

Ollie Bray Keynote from ISRU Conference2 on Vimeo.

Further workshop presentations and other links will be added to the conference website over the next week.

 

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.

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (4 of 8): 4 of 8: Bing Maps and Google Earth

This is number four 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

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.

There are lots of examples of how these two resources can be used but the ones I mentioned during the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events were:

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

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (3 of 8): Using Mobile Phones

This is the third 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 am a huge advocate for allowing children to use mobile phones in the classroom as long as they use them responsibly and that the school / teacher has some sort of technology policy.  If your interested in this particular area then you might also be interested in the Times Educational Supplement magazine article that I was heavily quoted in “Mobile Phones Friends or Foe”.

Anyway, as I am a huge advocate for mobile phones in classrooms it should come as no surprise to readers of this website that I am also a huge advocate of mobile phones when it comes to outdoor learning.

I first spoke about some of these ideas at the Royal Geographical Society last November. There are lots of Apps for the iPhone, Windows 7 Phone and Android that are appropriate for use within outdoor learning.

Some of the iPhone Apps that I mentioned at the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events were:

• iPhone notebook (built in)

• Google Maps and Satellite View (built in)

• Ordnance Survey Maps (I use OSBrowserR2)

• Built in GPS for Google Earth Exports (I use GPS recorder)

• Evernote – The ultimate electronic fieldwork notebook!

• Mobile blogging Apps – Including Typepad, Blogger and Wordpress

• Other fieldwork apps that night be appropriate for children (clinometer, compass etc…)

• AudioBoo – Great because people can subscribe to your 'Boos' through iTunes

• Speak and Spell – a letter game with a difference

Many of the Apps that I mentioned give children a real chance to send data back from the field and write their fieldwork reports as they go. The strength of both Evernote and AudioBoo is that it also gives us a real opportunity to help geo-locate children’s learning.

The GPS function of the phone should also not be under estimated and you can also buy a geocaching.com App.

Augmented Reality also has a huge amount of potential for its use in Outdoor Learning. I have recently been absolutely blow away by the Museum of London Street Museum App.

This App allows you to go to certain parts of London and the App augments pictures for the 1940s or historical artwork over real-time images of London. I’ve not had a chance to check this out personally yet but the demos look absolutely amazing.

Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should use the Street Museum App as part of our normal outdoor learning experience in schools. Although, I think it has huge scope here. Where I think the Street Museum App becomes really valuable is when we start to think about it in the context of children using it by choice themselves to extend their own learning and to make them independent learners because they have develped an interent in landscape and history.

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (2 of 8): Educaching

This is the second 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

Yesterday I wrote a post about geocaching. The location of geocaches in your area can be found by looking at geocaching.com and downloading the coordinates. Educaching is an evolution of the activity that contains some of the core ideas of geocaching (eg: it includes GPS).

The main difference, as I understand it, between the two activities is that geocaches tend to be quite permanent and educaches tend to be a little more temporary. Most educaches tend to be hidden for the duration of the learning activity and contain information or items help solve a problem or that are needed to progress with a task.

There are lots of examples of educaching on the Internet. But the example of learning about dinosaurs from Jen Deyenberg is the one that I have been talking about in my resent presentation.

Let me explain the process.

1) The class have been learning about dinosaurs. As part of their learning they have been finding out about Waterhouse Hawkins. Waterhouse Hawkins (8 February 1807– 27 January 1894) was a sculptor and natural history artist. He was the first person in the world to re-model dinosaur bones to create standing skeletons of dinosaurs. He is probably the most famous for recreating the 32 life-size models of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace Park, London. So, as part of their learning they read the book with the teacher on "The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins".

2) The next learning task was for the children to go and find some educaches. The educaches had been hidden by the teacher in the school grounds and contained a variety of paper dinosaur bones.  The children had to use the GPS coordinates to find all of the hidden bones.

3) Back in the classroom the children had to put the bones together as they were all muddled up.

4) Remember the project was linked to Waterhouse Hawkins who was one of the first people to take the bones are create 3D replications of the dinosaurs. So the class then took the bones and imagines what the dinosaur would have looked like before turning it into a 3D scaled model. There was discussion about why some of the dinosaurs would not stand up and what could and could not be fossilized.

5) The class then video conferenced with another school who had completed a similar activity and were able to talk in more detail about the process of fossilization.

6) Finally the children shared their learning on their personal class blogs.

Now, what I like about this particular activity is that the teacher could have achieved the objectives of the lesson by not taking the children outside at all and also by not using the technology. But instead the lesson used a combination of books, outdoor learning, technology, 3D modeling, collaboration and sharing.

In short it was a really blended lesson involving a variety of pedagogical styles. Some of the children would have been engaged because of the book, some because they went outside, some because of the GPS, some because of the video conference and some because of the physical modeling. But, they all would have been engaged, somehow and that is what the best learning and best lessons are about.

I’ll be writing more on educaching in the future.

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (5 of 5): Social Networks and Privacy

This is a last 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 last technology (in this series) that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is technology that will end privacy and at the moment I think that is social networking. I first talked about this in my Keynote to delegates at Edinburgh University on Digital Technology, Children and Young People in May 2010. Let me explain my thinking.


I don’t think privacy really exists any more. I know that in the UK we have laws that protect us against certain things but the reality of it is lots of people just give there data away and also data about other people as well. We just don't know we are doing - even though we have agreed to it when we 'tick' the small print.

I know that the Pew Internet Report suggests that young people are more concerned about privacy than ever before. But I don’t think the majority of young people in Scotland actually understand what we mean by privacy or on-line privacy (they are of course the same thing).

For example, if you asked an 11 year old if they were concerned about privacy, I think they would probably say, ‘yes’. If you asked them to define it, I think they might struggle? Of course I could be wrong – my only real research into this is personal observation and asking my 11 year old next door neighbor!

Lets take Facebook as an example. First of all we need to appreciate the amount of people that actually used this social networking site. In the UK at the time of writing its 44.4% of the population (or 58.12% of UK Internet users). If you don't think this is significant - think about the percentage of the population that voted at the last general election.

It doesn't matter if it is Facebook or the 'big' social networking site that comes next. The percentage of people using web and mobile based social networking will continue to increase as these services evolve over time.

One of the reasons for this is that for young people being part of a digital social network will become normal behavior (if it hasn’t already). This will probably continue to a point where you will actually be at a significant disadvantage if you are not part of a social networking space. The second reason is that most people now have the skills to access social networking spaces as the tools have become so easy to use and there is also a real purpose to do it for many people (eg: keeping in touch with your children and your grand children).

At the time of writing the UK the biggest growth of users of facebook in terms of demographic is the 45 - 54 age group and there are more female than male users of the site.  – this is a figure that surprises some people.

(ABOVE: Graph Showing Male / Female User growth for Facebook UK - source)

You are meant to be 13 years old or over to use facebook but we know that there are many children a lot younger than this who use the social networking space. Those children who have not grown into Facebook yet often occupy and use other social spaces on the Internet. Many of these are virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Mosi Monsters, Seapals, etc…

I’ll come back to virtual worlds in a separate post on Internet Safety and Responsible Use. But I think it is important that we acknowledge that many virtual worlds are also social networking spaces where information can be shared and given away. The diagram below shows just how many virtual world social networking spaces there are for young people. Did you know there were so many? Do you know which ones the children in your school inhabit?

Returning to Facebook. It is interesting to look at how Facebook default privacy setting have changed over time the diagram below shows 2005:

The next one is 2007:

The next one is 2009 (Dec):

And the final one is 2010 (April):

Here is the interesting thing. If you were an early adopter of Facebook your profile is probably quite secure as your privacy settings will not have changed very much unless you have purposely changed your profile to make it less private. Later Facebook adopters are more likely to have a less secure profile partly because later adopters could be less digitally literate and partly because most people just accept the default settings (and also don’t read the small print!).

The changes Facebook made to its defult privacy settings in April 2010 caused a massive backlash from Facebook users – who complained about privacy. As a result Facebook has now changed its privacy settings to make them more simplified.

This is fine but there are still a few problems with this in terms of children and young people. The first is that children still don’t understand the privacy settings because the language is not very accessible and the second thing is that it is not very ‘cool’ to make your profile private. This isn’t Facebooks fault (remember the site is for people aged 13 and over). We have a youth culture and education issue here and not a Facebook problem.

Now lets think of an example where a young person is using Facebook. They have their profile locked down so that it is not available on the public web. That’s great but quite often parts of their profile can still be accessed by people because they allow their ‘friends’ to access it.

The thing some people forget is that technology continues to change language.

Look at this picture below and think about what you see:

A lot of people (maybe not you) will see a ‘digital camera’ a 7 year old will see a ‘camera’.

It’s the same with 'friends'. A friend on a social networking space to a young person may not be someone they trust, know or have even met. A friend to many young people is just a connection. But if you are friends with that person, they can probably see your profile and access your photographs, favorites etc… The sames goes for friends of freinds.

In fact even if you are not a member of facebook there might be photographs of you on it. These photographs have been tagged by another person with your name and are now associated with your name and your picture and might be available on the public web (you have just become googleable…).

Photos are interesting because as soon as there is a photograph of you on the web then it is possible to look for ‘similar photographs’ and with every similar photograph there will be a bit more information to help build up your digital profile.

So what does this mean for schools and education?

First of all it means that the concept of teaching young people about digital footprints has to become a core part of our curriculum. But the only way that we are going to be able to do this is by making sure that teachers understand the concept of digital footprints and the impact that social networking technology will have on society (note i said will have - we won't be able to stop this).

Some people reading this post will think what I have suggested is scary and they will say, ‘that’s why I am not on facebook’. These could be some of the most dangerous people in the context of media literacy. If you are not on or have never been on facebook it is very unlikely that you will be able to educate young people about the possible risks of using technology. It is more likely that you will say, 'don't use it,' which young people will never do.

One thing is for sure. More and more people will continue to use technology like this and the people that don’t use it will become less and less. But, as more and more people sign up to the web to live, work and play - there becomes more and more data for other people to see, store, borrow and manipulate.

What do you think?

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (3 of 5): On-line translator tools

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.

Of course, if you read the second post in this series on voice input to text for the mobile you will already be thinking about what comes next.

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.

What do you think?