My first blog post so here goes...
Yesterday "Google" released Street View UK. This has been out in the States for over a year (?) and France and Italy were way ahead of us. The way the images were captured was by cars (pictured below getting a parking ticket) driving up and down every street of London (and other parts of the UK) capturing the images which created one huge joiner.
Below are a few grabs I got outside school:
Is it a bad thing that you can clearly identify individuals on the street?
3 comments:
A couple of months ago my brother gave me an online tour of his neighbourhood in Auckland, New Zealand using the Street View facility in Google Maps. It was a slightly spooky experience, talking via Skype and being guided along various suburban streets with phrases like "Go left at the white van on the corner" and "Look over there past the cyclist." I thought it was amazing and I got a real sense of where he lives having not visited him in the 7 years he's been out there. What's more, thanks to the genius of Skype, the whole experience of connecting with him 12,000 miles away cost me absolutely nothing. I can imagine all kinds of fascinating potential for this in terms of Language exchanges, international conferences, virtual tourist guides and news reports. It seems to me that we need to provide every classroom in the new school with a video conferencing facility so that we can make creative use of these new technologies. This could be simply and cheaply achieved. I'm not sure how regularly updated the images are but I don't suppose there is any risk from criminals or any need to be worried about the invasion of our personal lives. I'm already planning a virtual photography exchange with colleagues in Plymouth and North London.
Skype is a very very very good tool because its servers are designed for voice the sound quality is so much better the only thing it can not do is sort out the time diffrences. I think that video confrencing systems would work very well in schools, as they do in my sisters they have had confrences with verious diffrent places I think they have done one with a partner school and war memorial schools. I can think of how good it would be IE: Tallis a level students could talk to photography students at Boniface - I have chatted with some on Flickr and it has been good talking about techniques and how our two schools aproach the A level.
I had a very interesting discussion with my Year 11 group about Street View (at least I thought it was). We watched the how to use demo on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91wuBqlny50
and discussed how the media had responded to the new technology. There was some concern about the perceived invasion of privacy and also lots of excitement about its potential uses.
On a separate topic, maybe we could try and use Ichat and to set up a video conference in school and see how it works. Maybe PHSE groups around the school could end their lessons by sharing a mindmap or using the webcam to feedback?
Mr. Hawes
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