Cleveratom

Canon XL2 Camcorder

Hal

XL2 image

We have been very fortunate lately to be working with some excellent people. One such is Phil Sharp who works for Canon UK. Part of what we do is to undertake film and animation workshops around the UK, and occasionally get to do some filming for a wider project brief. Whilst at Ultralab we were fortunate indeed to have some pretty good kit to help us along the way, but at Cleveratom we have yet to purchase what we want/need. That’s where Phil comes in! He has arranged for us to have access to one and we have been using it on a project in the north of England.
Having a good camera like the XL2 for a few weeks (seemed like at least a month) really allowed us to get to grips with it’s capabilities. We were used to the ‘XL’ way of working, having had an XL1 previously. The XL2 has a much nicer interface and access to the common features is a lot more straight forward. Things like switching to 16:9 aspect ratio – on the XL1 this is buried deep in the menus… on the XL2 it’s a physical switch on the left hand side of the camera. The two XLR jacks on the back are a big improvement, as is the ability to switch easily into progressive scan mode.
So ok… it is not the newest of cameras, having largely been usurped by the HD trend. However, it is a great performing camera in the SD range, and I would buy one as soon as look at it. The lens is fabulous for the reportage style documentary work we have been engaged in, and whilst the camera is quite bulky, I like the solidity it offers.

Would I buy this over something like a Sony HVR Z1U? A tough call, since they are two different beasts, but I would definitely have one to hand if I could… and I’d have a sony as well 🙂

BBC Networked Identity, Science Museum, Serpentine gallery

Hal

From 19th to 23rd February The Networked identity week was running, which was a creativity week for young people aged 13-19, based at the Science Museum and later in the week the Serpentine Gallery. During this time I worked with a number of other people, including Christian Nold.

Christian has been developing his work with Biomapping – essentially a small device which measures your reaction to your environment (an emotional response), a little like a lie detector. Combine this with GPS data and you can make a really engaging activity out of walking around a location and mapping your responses to it as you go.

Rob Skitmore, assistant director at the Science museum also  gave us some time and worked with the group to make a simple telegraph device – from the ultra modern biomapping to a two hundred year-old communication device… but the participants all really enjoyed it!

Sophie Higgs was great, too – she worked with us at the Serpentine Gallery and showed us around the Karen Kilimnic exhibition. I was a little dubious of the reactions we would get to the work, but it was astonishingly good, and when Sophie explained some of the deeper meanings it really helped embed the experience with everyone. I certainly didn’t expect to respond to the art in the way I did, and it was an enjoyable moment or two for me! I would urge you all to visit Karen’s exhibition there and see what you make of it.

My thanks to Katy Holbird from the BBC, who was a pillar of support, but also to Sue Dewey and Chiara Hall, who worked tirelessly through their time at the event. Finally, thanks to matt and Alex who started the week off whilst I was at Gillingham! I’ll try to put some images together as a web gallery and publish them here as soon as I can.

Creativity in Learning with ICT

Hal

plasticene

Today I visited the home of Gillingham FC to present to an audience of teachers about creative learning with ICT, and how creativity can be part of the curriculum in their schools. This was an event organised by Kent CC, with keynote speaker David Hargreaves running the main sessions. My part was a workshop/breakout group with two sessions of about 40 people in each.

I was supported by Joe Moretti, an Apple Distinguished Educator from the West Country (heck of a journey) and Lara McDonald from the Apple Education team. Joe provided a number of MacBooks for the participants to use, plus his expertise in using the software, whilst Lara supported throughout the day helping users get the most from the kit. With this kind of support the day was only ever going to be good – my thanks to both for coming such a long way each to be part of the day.
I had a whole presentation planned but quickly left it behind as the interactive session ebbed and flowed along a number of lines and a rigid presentation wasn’t going to meet their needs.

We spent a good deal of time talking about learning, creativity and opportunities, and approached ideas of how we can move beyond the state of inertia that sometimes dominates schools when they need to move forward with ICT. We looked at the Chafford Hundred system (Chafford Hundred were also presenting, oddly enough) of using small portable devices instead of using larger laptops, and spent a few moments considering the impact that a device such as the iPhone is going to have on schools… well, those that don’t automatically ban them or discount them out of hand as being a nuisance in lessons (yes, there were some people who thought those thoughts in my session today).

We also used iStopMotion to investigate the processes learners go through when presented with a new situation – how their attitude and desire to talk about their learning comes to the fore – just as it does for children. I’m not convinced this message was as strong as it could have been, but in the limited time that we had (just 1.5 hrs per session) it was enough to broach the subject, I feel.

I also demonstrated the wonderful Chromatte system from Reflecmedia – this never fails to impress! The kit allows you to have any background you want and video yourself in front of it – there are so many possibilities for education I hardly know where to start… The idea was to have the simple animations on the screen and have the teams who made them talk about the process they went through. Time was against us, and it turned into a simple demo of the equipment with a good discussion of how it could be used.

I ran Alex Blanc’s brilliant ‘SMS Stickies’ application which uses Tim Ellis’s excellent Cocoa UltraSMS software. The basic principle is that Cocoa UltraSMS links to a bluetooth enabled mobile phone and extracts the SMS content into a MySQL database (in this case on my laptop). SMS Stickies then interfaces with the database to extract the information and present it on a web page – this means the audience can SMS in a comment and have it appear on the screen as the presenter is talking, or prefix their SMS with a code so that when it appears it is coloured to match a certain criteria – which is how I used it today.

There was a heck of a lot to go through and we only really touched on many things instead of explore few in depth, but I hope it was enough to wake up some taste buds for creative approaches to learning using ICT. As ever, I am happy to follow this work up with a personal visit to a school to explore how we could continue to work together.

Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!

Hal

What a journey in to work today! Four or five inches of snow and skidding all over the road was actually quite fun – at 20mph tops! I have always enjoyed the snow fall when it happens, but I remember as a child getting tired of it pretty quickly when it started to turn to slush and then freeze into large blocks of hard ice… I hope it stays white and fluffy until it disappears 🙂

So, here is what I saw when I got to work:

Cleveratom office block in the snow
And by lunchtime the car park had begun to turn to slush with all of the traffic… and school children making snowmen (nearly every school has been closed due to the weather today):

Cleveratom car park image

Quite a sight for a warming globe 😉

Cleveratom website gets a make-over

Hal

cleveratom web site designAs a company, Cleveratom has been trading for six weeks getting to grips with small business accounting, VAT returns, business insurances and indemnities, employer’s responsibilities and lots more… in between actually managing projects with a number of clients. Today, however, we’re finally able to get some more information on to our web page. It still isn’t complete, and there are lots of sections to add on different pages, but for now it shows the main information to anyone who wishes to read it.

The web design has been done ‘in house’ by Alex Blanc using CSS templates. The front page will eventually be more dynamic as RSS feeds from various web sites (including this blog) are added to it. As you will see, the code for the page is very straight forward, it’s the CSS which does all the work.

The site is optimised for slightly larger screen sizes (1024×768) as we believe that it is time to move on from being locked to 800×600 resolutions! We ran a survey of screen resolutions on a number of different web sites of ours, and found that an increasingly small percentage of viewers are using low resolution – most are at least at 1024×768 now, and many are far higher. Google analytics is extremely useful in finding this information, as is Sitemeter, which gives a number of excellent web site tracking tools.
Head over to the Cleveratom site now and see what you think!