Time Travel at The Burj Khalifa
Continuing from my previous post ‘ICT at the Burj Khalifa (The World’s Tallest Building, Dubai)‘. Having experienced the ICT on offer in the Lobby, I then had to join the male queue for security checks (just like at the airport). From there I wondered through the many corridors, occasionally stopping to read through the information presented on the walls or watch the videos playing ‘Burj Khalifa, facts and figures’. The decor throughout was very impressive, dark walls with etched blueprints of the designs and inspirations (the hymenocallis desert flower) for the building.
It was then in to the lift, which I have to say is the most amazing lift I’ve ever been in, simply for the decor and speed (40mph).
Reaching the 124th floor took just under a minute. Again I was welcomed by the friendly staff and directed towards the outdoor viewing platform, which overlooked the incredible water fountains and my favourite Hotel in Dubai ‘The Address’. The view was amazing and I’d timed it just right, still light enough to see everything and not to late to catch the sunset. Looking up towards the top of the building from this point was still incredible, another 82 floors above me before reaching it’s peak (828 m).
Taking a step inside was no disappointment, with floor to ceiling windows you could do a complete 360 walk around the building and see all that Dubai has to offer. It was inside that I stumbled across the interactive ‘binoculars’. I thought I had to pay to use them but it turns out it was all free.
I was really impressed with the options available on these devices, you could either:
- View a live stream of what was in front/below you
- See what you were looking at but what it would look like in the ‘Day’ time
- See what you were looking at but what it looked like 10 years ago
It was strange to see Dubai of 10 years ago and see how much it had developed over a decade. A great history resource for the children at my school to enlighten them on what life used to be like only a short while ago in Dubai.
In my next post I’ll show you how they’re using Augmented Reality on the observation deck!
In: Experiences · Tagged with: Burj Khalifa, Dubai, ICT
ICT at the Burj Khalifa (The World’s Tallest Building, Dubai)
I recently visited the 124th floor (viewing deck) of the worlds tallest building, The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. I was impressed by the use of ICT so thought I would write a blog post about it.
You gain access to the world’s tallest building via the worlds largest mall (The Dubai Mall). Having booked my ticket two days before for AED100 (About £20) to avoid paying the instant access fee of AED400 (about £80), I was welcomed by the pleasant staff and directed in to the lobby.
This is where you first experience the ICT facilities and I must say I was quite impressed by what was on offer.
First off an interactive globe, which labels most major cities in the world. You can select a city from the globe and then see what the world’s tallest building would look like in the skyline of that city. It was quite interesting to see what the Burj Khalifa would look like amongst the New York City Skyline.
The second interactive resource on offer is a huge, multi touch screen information point. This device allows you to compare the Burj Khalifa against other tall structures throughout the world, such as the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Burj Al Arab hotel or The Eiffel Tower. It presents information about each of the structures and allows you to sort them by height, year of construction or other criteria.
This was just the start of my interactive experience at The Burj Khalifa. In my next post I’ll show you how I time travelled in the world’s tallest building!
In: Experiences · Tagged with: Burj Khalifa, Dubai, ICT
Wallwisher – 5IM and 5LN Book Review
It’s book week at school this week and so yes I treated the staff and students to my usual Pirate outfit from my favourite book ‘The Spikey Haired Pirate’ (not really a book but the kids didn’t know and I don’t own another costume).
Anyway, it’s been a good day, the kids looked great, my favourite being JO dressed as The Joker out of Batman The Black Night, he nailed it. Best staff had to go to Mr. McGarry who looked to comfortable in his Fairy Godmother outfit, make-up and all.
Decided to use Wallwisher with year 5 to do a book review, again they couldn’t get enough of it and had lots of questions about the website ‘can you add video’s to it?’ ‘can anyone add to the wall, even my mum?’ ‘can we edit other peoples posts?’.
It went really well and everyone managed to do a Google image search for an appropriate picture and then write a short, no more than 140 characters sticky note for why it’s their favourite book.
Here’s 5IM’s final wall:
Wallwisher 5IM Book Review
And here’s 5LN’s final wall:
Wallwisher 5LN Book Review
In: Examples of Student Work · Tagged with: book review, book week, wallwisher
Augmented Reality with year 5
Well I finally got the opportunity to introduce Sasquatch to year 5 today and they loved it! To say they were amazed is an understatement, it generated so many questions ‘how does it work?’, ‘are there other characters?’, ‘can I have a go?’ to list a few.
After the introduction and discussion about this technology and how it was a means of combining the real world with the digital world, I let the children experiment with the website. I printed each child a copy of the required image and after waiting a while for the site to load they set off using the built in web cams on their Lenovo laptops.
As well as hoping to generate a reaction from the students, by introducing this ‘New Technology’, which it did, I also hoped it would encourage them to take their enthusiasm home and ‘maybe’ share what they had been doing in ICT with their parents.
In all honesty it couldn’t have gone any better, the very next day children from other year groups were asking me what Sasquatch was and several of the children had figured out how to create an animation with Sasquatch and add it to the Gallery.
Here’s a clip of just one students work, which he did at home a few hours after the lesson.
In: Examples of Student Work · Tagged with: AR, Augmented Reality, Sasquatch
Accessing the Shared Drives
In this video tutorial I will show you how to access the shared drives if they are not appearing on log in.
It requires you to make a copy of a VBScript file. Keep the VBSCript file on your desktop at all times and if the shared drives don’t appear simply double click on the script and they will sync to your machine.
In: Software · Tagged with: mapping, shared drives, VBScript
Sasquatch – Augmented Reality
Been looking in to Augmented Reality for a while now:
“Augmented reality is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery”
Thank you Pete O’Brien for introducing me to this cool online application (http://www.livingsasquatch.com/) where Augmented Reality is used to create a hologram of ‘Sasquatch’ the little bigfoot. The videos are free to create, no subsciption required and it’s free to download and email your final movie. Will hopefully introduce this to the children in a few weeks and keep you posted on how it goes. For now take a look at my first video and let me know what you think.
Can you imagine how much the kids are going to love this!
Year 5 Picasso Website
During ‘Art Work’ year 5 decided to study the work of Picasso. The ICT element of the unit was introduced to the children as a ‘Real World’ activity, I was from the London Art Museum and required a team of designers to create for me a website about the legendry Picasso. The purpose of the website was to provide young children with information about his life and work as well as providing a small gallery of his art collection.
With only 5 lessons to complete the task the children worked extremely hard and produced some excellent end products. We used Serif WebPlus a free, child friendly application to develop the site and the winning design (by 10 year old Sophie J) can be seen here.
In: Examples of Student Work
Wordle
After attending the year 4 school trip to Dibba, the students worked on describing their experience. When introducing the ICT element of the unit we worked on keywords, discussing what words we knew we could use and then finding synonyms of these words using www.easydefine.com
Once the students had built up a bank of keywords we entered them in to Wordle (www.wordle.net ). This creatred for us a graphical representation of our words which the students could then edit and format.
Below is just one example of work created by a year 4 student (Jack T), all finished graphics were of excellent stadard and the children really enjoyed using the Wordle website.
In: Examples of Student Work
March of The Penguins
This is an example of a piece of year 6 work (Molly T – 11 years old).
The topic was March of The Penguins, the idea was to incorporate ICT in to the topic by creating a trailer/advert pitch for an up and coming documentary using Photo Story 3.
The children first of all had to create a dramatic introduction using still images, audio and text. Then they had to create short snippets/clips of information that would be covered in the documentary e.g. The Penguin life cycle, hunting for food etc.
This is just one example of many fantastic final products. An excellent collaborative unit, showing good practice of how ICT can be incorporated in to a themed project.
In: Examples of Student Work
Useful Websites for ICT in Education Web 2.0
With the introduction of Web 2.0 technology ICT in education has more potential than ever to provide extended learning for students of all abilities and interests. Web 2.0 technology plays to the strengths of educators by opening the doors to collaberation and participation. I have researched many new technologies and below I have listed those which I feel all teachers (primary or secondary) would find useful and engaging for all children.
www.edmodo.com – A private social platform for teachers and students to share ideas, files, events and assignments. I am loving this site, only had a little play with it myself and just waiting for the right time to introduce it to the students but it is fantastic what I have seen!
www.diigo.com - The Toolbar offered for donload on this site allows you to highlight and add stickies to websites and then keeps a log of these highlights and stickies. Fantastic research tool!
www.wallwasher.com – An on-line noticeboard maker where you can attach video’s, images, files and links. Again another excellent collaberation tool.
www.voicethread.com – A collaberation tool which allows you to share and interact with images, documents and videos. This website is awesome and can be used in so many different ways.
www.livingsasquatch.com – Augmented Reality…”It’s the future!”. A FANTASTIC application with so much potential and something the children will totally engage with., give it a go and let me know. (also try http://scimorph.greatfridays.com/#/home)
Enjoy and let me know what you think about them!