iWork and iWork.com

Mr Nicholls, Mr Murray and Myself have been experimenting with iWork as a way of collaborating and developing projects. Basically iWork.com beta allows for you to upload a Pages, Keynote, or Numbers document to a virtual site where people can comment and annotate your ideas. So if you put together a draft Pages document you can get interested parties to leave stickies with comments to help you move your ideas on, or you can leave a "note' on the idea and this feedback is collated so you have a history of responses and comments.

Could this be an effective way for us to collaborate on our summer project? Could staff share an outline of their teaching plans and invite students to have some input on how a topic might be taught, or the different options for students to share their learning? Could it be an effective way for the school council to share their plans and get feedback?

A Visit to Rivington Place

Rivington Place

Thanks to everyone who visited Rivington Place today and contributed lots of valuable ideas. I thought the Liminal exhibition provoked plenty of fascinating debate and helped to fuel a brief but exciting brainstorming session. Don't forget that we have arranged to meet every Tuesday at 3:45pm in Room 80C (the sixth form computer room) so that we can continue planing our summer events and gain our Arts Award accreditations.

Here is a summary of what we discussed in the afternoon session:

Tom really liked the theme of change and the use of role play in a radical alteration of the physical space of the current school building. What might it be like to transform the school into a country ruled by a despotic leader? Could we change the function of internal spaces, create our own currency and economic conditions, form a government, arrange political protests etc.?

Amber and Matthew definitely wanted to change the building, especially the corridors and other in-between spaces using sound. How could we explore the idea of absence and leaving a building behind? What does the building sound like? The school appears very geometric, doesn’t look very engaging from the outside but is interesting inside. How important is sound in learning? Could we create a Maze/Labyrinth type game using the whole site? A promenade performance or quest? What for? Moving between locations where performances/activities take place. Changing perceptions of the school building and what happens in it. Demonstrating the importance of new media technologies in learning. The element of surprise; the unexpected. Part of a consultative process with parents that could become an annual event. Need a place to gather at the end of the event – a meal and conversation.

Billy and Tom wanted to create a massive game of Quasar Laser to engage parents and students in learning together. Young people become experts. Could use Twitter to keep a record of a conversation about learning. Guide visitors around the school. Turn the school into an alien landscape using special effects, a series of strange occurrences and making the school unrecognisable through strange lighting. Perhaps we could change the story about school; create a different narrative about learning by challenging conventions and expectations about how learning is structured.

I am really looking forward to reading your reviews of the exhibition. This is your first task for the Arts Award. Perhaps you could add your thoughts as (very long and detailed) comments to this post?

Deaf Create

Deaf Create is a new blog set up by Mr Hawes. Here is his description of what it's all about:

"So what is 'Deaf Create'? Deaf Create is a blog forum for interested parties and participants in a new scheme set up by Greenwich Deaf Advisory Service. The Deaf Support Centre at Thomas Tallis School have, over the past year , been experimenting with using new media technologies to support their deaf students, and it seemed a good idea to share their experiences and knowhow with other schools and units across the borough that support deaf students. To make this happen three primary schools, a secondary school and a post-16 college have been included in the plan to create a pathway for using new media from early years education to post-16. I hope that this blog will allow all the different participants to share their work, technical difficulties, solutions and successes, as well as creating an archive of examples of new media in action."

Head on over to the blog to check it out. Don't forget to leave a comment or two.

The Vertical Grouping Experience

This short film captures the views of staff and students about the vertical tutor group experiment that took place recently. We are engaging in a detailed piece of research about the potential value of a vertical pastoral system and the film contains a full spectrum of views which will help inform debate.

Generating Ideas

What follows is a list of useful web resources designed to promote creative thinking, specifically the generation of ideas:

The Idea Generator
You can get this application on your iPhone but it works just as well on the web. Simply click a button and scramble a three word phrase. We play it at home. I shake my phone, a phrase is created and the kids have 5 minutes to design an "eco-friendly kinetic instrument", or whatever it says.

Jump Start
This site asks you to state a challenge you are facing and then, once you have clicked a button, presents you with three randomly generated adjectives for you to use to help create a solution. This theory can be found in Edward de Bono's book on Lateral Thinking.

Watizit
This site encourages you to engage in some divergent thinking based on responding to a random graphic shape (What is it?). It's quite a long process to complete all the steps but I found it very useful.

Magnetic Poetry
An online version of the fridge magnet game. This link takes you straight to The Artist collection. Try different techniques for making your poem. Choose words randomly, or words beginning with the same letter, or words of only one syllable. Don't worry too much about the poems making sense. Use your intuition and if it sounds good to you, then maybe it is really good. If you create any particularly beautiful poems, why not post them as Comments?

WordGizmo
Generate a word that dosen't yet exist in any language and volunteer to define it. Hours of fun!

Thinkature
A web based collaborative mind-mapping tool.

An A-Z of Creativity Techniques
It does what it says on the tin. I was quite taken with Superheroes in which participants pretend to be a fictional (or real) super-hero (Superman, the Incredible Hulk, Batman, James Bond, Wonder Woman, Sherlock Holmes, Spiderman, etc.) and use their ‘super’ characteristics to trigger ideas.

Oblique Strategies
This one's a bit clever clever but what else can you expect from Brian Eno? The application for the iPhone is really lovely. This website is less than lovely but provides you with refreshable statements for those who've reached a creative impasse and is based on the original decks of cards.

That's enough to be going on with. I'd be interested to know if you found any of these tools useful.

Food For Thought

I've had a play with Slideshare and worked out how to attach an audio track, courtesy of Internet Archive. I hope this presentation helps to prepare everyone for the event on 30th March at Rivington Place. It would be good to lay the table (so to speak) with a cornucopia of ideas about our Food for Thought project. I strongly recommend that you have a go at making your own Slidecast. Hours of fun!

Food For Thought

View more presentations from fotologic.

Slideshare

Check out this SlideShare Presentation by Zek Hoeben from Fortismere School in Haringey. Slideshare is a cool application that enables you to create web based presentations. This one features ideas related to this year's Edexcel Art & Design theme "Discord". Why keep your teaching resources on the hard drive of your computer when you can share them with fellow professionals around the world?

Discord PP

View more presentations from Zek Hoeben.

360 Street View

This is my attempt to create a 360 degree view of the world at the end of my drive, inspired by Google Maps Street View. I took about 45 pictures on my iPhone and stitched them together using Photoshop CS3. I've cropped the resulting image slightly at the bottom and filled in a couple of gaps with the clone stamp. Other than that, it's all the result of the automated photomerge function. There are a couple of strange sections - the neighbour's house looks like it's on fire and the edges of the pavements don't meet up, but you can see similar glitches in the Google pictures. Apparently, Google have had to remove some images from Street View because of complaints. One man was pictured throwing up outside a night club, for example. There's also a function for blurring faces. I'm pretty sure that most people will find the new service extremely useful and very entertaining. But does it have any educational benefits? Could we create our own virtual tour of Thomas Tallis School? Would this be a great way to capture the old building before the it is demolished? Could this building be embedded inside Street View? Could we make a ghost version of Tallis that could be explored, by people who had never set foot inside it, from the new building?

A Street View of British Art

Following on from Tom's excellent post about Street View, it appears that Tate Britain have joined the bandwagon by creating links to places across the UK depicted in famous paintings in the national collection. The image above is an example of a Turner painting of The Thames from just outside Tate Britain on Millbank. The idea, I suppose, is that you can now visit the locations using Street View and compare the painted and real (as photographed by Google) landscapes. There are some fairly profound philosophical issues about all this virtual tourism and I've read a couple of interesting comments in the papers about invasions of privacy. I wonder if we could create an inter-disciplinary project linking subjects like art history, geography and photography? I'm going to attempt a 360 degree photograph today in imitation of the joiners on Street View. I'll post the result here if I can make it work.

Google Maps Street View

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.

I just thought I would share this to see what people think.

Below are a few grabs I got outside school:

Is it a bad thing that you can clearly identify individuals on the street?

Any ideas

What did you think of the Living cinema event? Were there any ideas that we might want to use for our event in the summer? Did you like the fact that the birds were being controlled by a wii remote and the colours and speed changed when a drum beat was played?