Tom Barrett

I would not usually talk about such things but thought I would mention the site I have contributed the pictures to. The Classroom Displays blog collates ideas surrounding this very creative element of school life. After taking photos of my DT display on Shelters and uploading these to my Flickr account I added them to the Classroom Display Group. This is a pool of photographs, that Linda the TA behind the blog runs, and is a great resource for visual ideas. I have also added some notes to my Flickr photos to illustrate some of the parts of the display better.

Let me know what you make of it – and why not take a photo of one of your good displays and contribute to the growing pool of pics. This would also be a great professional development opportunity and helps contribute to portfolios of work. I have started my own School Displays set in my Flickr account to keep such evidence.

I was passed on the details of this fascinating new site for children. It looks delicious and is described as:

WebbliWorld is an exciting, stimulating, virtual world that kids can explore, inhabit, belong to and share. It is a world that promotes caring, responsible behaviour and gives kids the opportunity to voice their opinions on topics that matter.

You create a Webbli (avatar) and there are ways to earn Webbles, the going currency in WebbliWorld. Currently I have amassed a small fortune of 1000 Webbles from emailing the site details to some friends and rating other Webblis, what I will do with the stash I don’t quite know yet. Games and internet links are presented to you by 3 characters – Wanda, Wez and Wij.

It is early days for the site but with involvement from Aardman Animations it seems set to be very engaging for children, some of the little animated shorts are very cute. There is also a WebbliBlog tracking news and developments, may be worth an initial look and keeping tabs on in the future.

Another fantastic TED talk video that illustrates some great concept work to do with desktop or computer interfaces. Years ago my brother showed me some flash swf file where a ball had simple physics and could be thrown around the screen, bouncing all over, but would act like a normal ball, coming to rest on the bottom of the screen. BumpTop applies similar complex physics laws to all of your documents and allows you to treat them (your digital docs) in the same way you might on your real desk.

(Click on the image to watch the TED Talks film in a new window – I have tried for 10 minutes to embed the video here but I am too tired to fiddle with it anymore…)

My only issue I have with this fantastic concept is the way we even interface with such a design. When Anand Agarawala, the creator of Bumptop, demonstrated his idea at TED he used a mouse with a laptop. To me that seemed to almost contradict the very foundation of his idea, the visceral kinaesthetic type approach.

He criticised the point and click style desktops but still used a mouse to do his demo. In my opinion the software has to start marrying up with the hardware – we see Anand showing gesture style moves to register command and menu options and all of these things are and can be implemented on touch screen surfaces with their gesture driven interfaces. I think that such a combination will herald the very best from Bumptop.

Amazingly we have had our first cycle of NEC projectors in school since December 2003 and since we have added a replacement budget we decided it was time to update.

So we have moved from the NEC VT 560 data projector which served us reasonably well. One of the main problems we have had is colour staining on the image. Over time a blank white screen becomes stained and smudged with yellow and red tinges. Clearly the lamp units can be more expensive for older models – so we felt investing in more replacement bulbs would be wasted money.

From a recommendation and experience of the projector within one class in school, we have invested in the Epson EMP82.

I would highly recommend this unit at the moment for the single reason of the warranty. It comes with a specific education warranty for 3 years that includes projector and lamps. Yes that is right… and lamps! So if the lamps fail within the warranty period they will not only provide a replacement but also provide an engineer who will come to your site and do the replacement for you. I think that is a great deal considering replacement lamps are often the most expensive consumables in school.

Of course the projector is supremely bright and secure – PIN locked when the mains are off and the version we have has an orange security plate over the unit controls so you have to have the remote or else it is useless.

It is really important to shop around for as long as you can manage for this product – especially when buying in bulk. After spending yet another afternoon looking for prices I was able to get another £35 off of the lowest initial unit prices we had. It all helps.

Having used mine for a few days I would have to say that the 2000 ANSI Lumens make a great deal of difference on a dull Monday morning. NEC started us on our journey and now Epson are set to carry us on.

http://www.epson.co.uk/contact/brochure/Projector/EMP_62_82.pdf