Monthly Archives: November 2010

My Critical Study Proposal for my MA – comments welcome

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An investigation into whether blogging has a significant impact on learning for a group of pupils.  I intend to identify a group of students who cover a range of ages and abilities as well as experience with blogging and track how their interaction with blogging through both writing and reading blogs assists with learning in the classroom.

I’m worried this is hardly revolutionary or different.  My other option is a critical study on games based learning.

iPhone light painting attempt one (inspired by @dentsulondon)

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For a while now I've been inspired by this video by an ad agency in London called Dentsu.  It shows a rather cool usage of iPad's to lightpaint by extruding or dragging an animation through space on a long exposure.

This seemed too cool to pass up.

So how to make my own?

  1. I have no iPad
  2. I only use Sketchup as a free 3d software tool – no virtual cat scans as described in the Dentsu video
  3. Due to an unfortunate accident in a French hotel 3 years ago (reality of what happened is actually a lot more mundane than it sounds) my current very decent Nikon d90 is restricted to a 50mm f1.4 lens
None of the above was going to stop me though!

So step one was to design the 3d shape I wanted to light paint and I thought a great start would be my son's name, Benjamin.  I used Google Sketchup to design what I thought would be a reasonable simple low resolution 3D representation of his name and it proved to be fairly easy to knock up.  I knew though I wouldn't be able to 'convert' this into a 2d animation for the extrusion so it's purpose was to guide my in how I create the letters in Photoshop which would be the next step.

Light1

I then moved into Photoshop and after setting up an image size to match my iphone resolution I then started to draw the blocks necessary to pull out the letters.  I worked on the principle that a single block would be 80 by 80 pixels and therefore the side of the letter B would be 400 pixels tall by 80 wide.  Using each layer for a new section of a letter I built up the letters for the first part of my son's name, Ben.

Light2

Converting them into frames was fairly easy.  The difficult part was selecting a video type which I could upload to my iPhone.  My first method I tried was uploading the MP4 using email.  Next time I try this I will try the VLC player app I have.

I soon discovered a couple of problems.  Firstly I completely forgot to add a couple of extra frames to the beginning and end of the video to prevent the screen of the iphone from reappearing and secondly despite choosing what I thought were good settings for the video it still came out slightly squashed.

I decided to press ahead with shooting the animation a couple of times to see if I could get the letter extrusion to work.  I used the side of my son's cot as a reference point as the slats would help me to perfect my timing in terms of dragging the phone through the air.  Tweaking the settings on the camera gave me a usable result shooting 10s at f2 iso 200.

This is the best of the first attempts.  You can make out an E and possibly the beginnings of an N.  For a first attempt I was quite pleased with the result.

Light3

A couple of lessons to learn from this.

  1. I realised when watching the dentsu video again the frames for each part of a letter consisted of a wireframe rather than a block of white.  This will be rectified.
  2. To simplify creating messages I will work on slowly building up an alphabet of prebuilt frames which can be dropped into order to create a word.
  3. This is fun!
till next time
brian

5 ideas for English [Scanned]

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5 ideas for English.pptx
Download this file

I’ve been grappling for a while on the best way to bring Web 2.0 tools and similar services to other subject areas.  I’ve tried optional training sessions which have failed as well as one on one demonstrations which have had slightly better effect.  To take into account also my growing collection of subject resources on my delicious account (http://www.delicious.com/briansharland and http://www.delicious.com/briansharland/bundle:Subjects ) I have come up with what I hope will be a better way of providing professional development in ICT tools to other members of staff.

I’ve taken as inspiration Tom Barretts ‘Interesting ways’ series as well as RM Byrne’s ‘Free Technology for Teachers’ blog as a structure for presenting 5 ideas for a subject area.  Whereas Tom takes a single methodology such as blogging or iPods and encourages development of ideas along that line I am taking a subject area and trying to find tools and services which could support that academic area.

These have been written to fit with my own school although they are free to use by others in a non-commercial setting.

To start off I have written one on English.  The next step will be to sit down with our school’s English department and use the time to work through these as a professional development session.

More subject areas will hopefully follow and I will also produce sequels to the English presentation in the future.

Any ideas or thoughts greatly appreciated.