On Tuesday, I was with a small group of Year 10 geography pupils sitting in our new multimedia room. We were clustered round a laptop waiting for a video call using skype. The call was coming in from Antarctica from Robert Swan, who is currently living at the 2041 E-Base relying solely on renewable energy for the first time in Antarctic history.
The call came through and there we were having a live video chat with Robert about the issue of climate change and what we can all do about it. Wow! Now that’s what I cal education for the 21st Century.
The use of skype from remote locations presents numerous possibilities for engaging young people in environmental and social issues. The software is free. The calls are over the internet, so you just pay for the use of the internet during that time (a bit more expensive somewhere like Antarctica where you are reliant on satellite networks such as BGAN).
If anyone could tell me how I could take part in a live conversation taking place using something like skype, and show it on a website simultaneously, I would be eternally grateful!
Really proud of the team - John, Ciara and Marjan for making sure the IAE expedition blog for 2041 looks so amazing, has great functionality and went live so soon after the 2041 main site.
I just love this site, but then that’s me. It’s exciting to see how far Wordpress as a platform can be taken (this is the inner geek in me).
If you are making Digital Video for the classroom, here are a few pointers to make life easier for teachers:
- 1-4 minutes is great for Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14)
- 5-20 minutes is great for Key Stages 4 and 5 (ages 14-19), where a more in depth exploration of a topic may be useful (although short clips are also still useful)
- attention in the classroom can be lost in the blink of an eye, so it’s great if video can be integrated into interactive whiteboard software - the most commonly used is the SMART Board software, Notebook
- Notebook currently only supports Flash Video (.flv and .swf) and so Digital Video should be downloadable in either of these two formats
If you are a teacher looking to integrate Digital Video into your SMART Board resources:
Good luck and have fun inspiring the next generation.
The Guardian wrote a great article about some of the ideas coming out of the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine last month - mapping emotions and wonderfully beautiful and shocking digital images detail the effluent of rampant consumerism.
Chris Jordan’s images combine massive digital photographs (up to 26 x 43 feet) with statistics about the amount of waste produced in the United States. To be faced by an image of 170,000 life-size batteries would certainly bring the point home. Above is one of Chris’ images of Mobile Phones in Atlanta, visit his website to see more of his work.
I was very interested to read about Christian Nold’s work on mapping emotions using Google Earth and a devices to measure adrenaline levels. As Christian points out, with more and more of the world’s population living in cities, it is important to look at more imaginative ways that demonstrate how humans react to the urban environment.
To read the full text of the article, visit The Guardian.
As part of the preparations for the HSBC Offscreen Student Expedition 2008, Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop travelled to Lebanon to investigate how to galvanise a massive online audience for the expedition to the UK in July 2008.
The Offscreen Education Programme used the Digital Explorer model on the joint expedition in February 2007, giving it a design edge inconceivable a year ago.
The next collaboration sees 8 students and 4 teachers from Lebanon, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman come to the UK in July 2008. Whilst in Beirut Injaz Lebanon and the British Council organised a Youth focus group to look at technology and web trends amongst teenagers in Beirut and beyond (download the full report - pdf 44k).
There were a couple of interesting points. The first that Facebook has complete dominance as the social networking platform amongst young people. The second was that call rates on mobiles are prohibitively high and so there is a large text and bluetooth culture. Interestingly, the dominance of Facebook made RSS an anathema and Flickr obsolete. Some still used YouTube, but again the video functionality of Facebook was a big factor.
If you would like to discuss these matters, please join the Offscreen in Lebanon Facebook group.
The first in a series of 10 UK workshops supported by Google took place on Monday 12 November in Swansea. Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop was joined by 12 educators from South Wales to learn how to create virtual fieldwork using Google Earth.
It was great to be on the road and bringing this kind of training to educators who cannot get up to the courses in London. Duncan Hawley (Geography PGCE tutor at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education) was our host for the day, and made the excellent point of developing a deeper pedagogy for the work. Based on his feedback, we will look to develop a deeper range of links and resources on Digital Explorer’s Google Earth pages and host an online forum where educators from all over the UK will be able to discuss how they are applying the methodology in their classrooms and in the field.
For details on future roadshow courses visit the Royal Geographical Society website.
The courses are supported by Google and run in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Digital Explorer has received generous sponsorship from Garmin and Olympus in providing equipment.
I have just developed some resources which may be of use to others teaching Antarctica in Key Stage 3 geography.
The first is on the Antarctic Food Web. I used it by putting a class in an IT room asking them to find information about all the animals that lived in the seas around Antarctica and making notes in their books. We then reviewed the activity by using the flash-based food web on the Royal Geographical Society’s excellent Discovering Antarctica site.
Here’s the Antarctica Food Web kmz file for Google Earth.
And here are a series of graphs that I prepared using the excellent GE Graph programme:
I used these files just as presentational tools from the front of the classroom to show the difference between the climate in Antarctica and London. Because I taught these lessons last week, I used the rainfall and temperature in London in October as a benchmark.
Please let me know if you find these useful.
TechCrunch writes a great review of web video, noting that things have moved on since Google bought YouTube a year ago. Incredibly informative and a must for anyone looking to host video online.
One other thought…
Please, please, please don’t host your video only on YouTube or similar media-sharing sites. Only the most enlightened schools haven’t blocked these.
By all means use a service such as tubemogul to propagate your video on a number of sites. This will mean that young people can access your content on their own terms outside of school.
I am looking to develop a hosting service for teachers, schools and other developers of educational web video. If you don’t have the ability to host web video at the moment and want your films to be viewed in the classroom, Digital Explorer should be able to help sometime in 2008. Busy times ahead!
There are two things that I have noticed when using web video in the classroom. The first and most pertinent is pupils asking me to enlarge the player to full-screen. When using media players such as Windows Media Player or Real Player this is fairly simple. The complication comes with embedded flash video. In a Year 11 Citizenship class examining the issues of debt and aid, I used video from the Make Poverty History website. The problem was that the videos could not be enlarged. This left some of the less enthusiastic members of the class fairly disgruntled.
The solution:
- use a video player that has the functionality to enlarge to full-screen (the best I can find is Jeroen Wijering’s excellent flv player)
- ask your school IT department to upgrade to Flash version 9 (this will mean that the enlarge function will work)
- produce video using the .flv format, which will ’stretch’ without the image becoming too blocky
The second issue is the 10-20 seconds gap between pressing play and the video starting. This is enough time for young minds to wander or assume that their teacher is a technological incompetent (I still hold that by some quirk, teachers’ ability to function a DVD/Video player has a strong inverse correlation with their length of time in the classroom). This is a mistake that we made (as with the one above) on the Offscreen Student Expedition, by having a black screen and a boring pre-loader (the small animation that shows as the video gets ready to play).
The solution:
- have an still image rather than a black screen before the video plays
- think about having some interesting animation going on so that pupils know that something is about to happen (nothing too extravagant)
- or maybe use some attention grabbing optical illusion that will keep their attention (if you stare at the dot below for long enough the grey haze recedes)
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