Tag: apple

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School’s out Friday

I’m laying odds that the people at Head Office of IKEA in Sweden are looking very closely at their Singapore division and wondering what kind of Christmas bonus they can offer them this year. The ‘BookBook’ video, uploaded to YouTube by IKEA Singapore, has racked up over 10 million views in a week  – a pretty clever marketing ploy by anyone’s standards. Send up your product in a parody of an Apple ad and watch it go viral. Just what I need for impetus for my ‘Language of our Times’ class next term, when we begin our Project Based Learning task exploring ‘What makes an idea go viral?’

Speaking of Apple, their latest video, ‘Perspective’, shown at their Keynote launch this week, is another signature Apple piece appealing to their tribe of followers.  Take a look.

Over 600,000 views in three days. Another good one for my students to analyse.

I’m currently in Munich, where I’ve spent the last three days after visiting Italy for a week. In my last post I spoke of my poor footwear choices leading to some pretty difficult days limping through the streets of Florence and Venice. I’m pleased to report Munich has been much kinder on my feet. It’s a very flat terrain here, and we’ve slowed down our pace out of sheer necessity. We were exhausted after the heady pace of four cities in 7 days – Rome, Florence, Pisa and Venice. Today, after reading some travel blogs about the best footwear for traipsing through Europe, I purchased some Geox walking shoes that I’m hoping will see me right through the next few days in Frankfurt and Bad Kreuznach and then onto Paris and  London in the coming weeks.

I will try to write here about some of our experiences – we’ve had an amazing time already. Yesterday we visited Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site and that experience deserves a post of its own. I’ve read so much about the Holocaust, but nothing really prepares you for walking the grounds and listening to a guide take you through the experiences of the people who were subjected to that cruel fate. It’s an experience everyone should have – as I walked through, it struck me that it is something that could feature as a Google Tour – that way students all over the world could have that experience and hopefully understand why the International Memorial there has the words, ‘Never again’ written in six languages.

Our hectic pace continues tomorrow, My husband and son are off the Bayern Munich vs Stuttgart game in the afternoon, then we board a train for Frankfurt in the evening, arriving there close to midnight and hoping that the accommodation I’ve booked doesn’t fall through!

I hope your weekend sees you finding time to relax and take in some sun. Enjoy whatever comes your way. 🙂

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Steve Jobs on life, love, loss and death

Spend the next fifteen minutes watching Steve Jobs address College graduates from Stanford University in December 2009 * (Update – my mistake – it was from 2005. Explains why he didn’t mention the liver transplant). He takes you on a journey through his life. You won’t regret the time spent. If you’re smart, you’ll find time in the classes you teach to show it to your students. Steve’s message,

“you can’t connect the dots looking forwards, you can only count them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”

is an important one. Steve’s road to success has not been an easy one, but he has risen above adversity.

Herein lie messages our students need to hear.

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Loving my iPhone : )

I’m on camp at the moment and the iPhone has come into its own for me. I’ve only had it for a week and a half, but already I am viewing mobile technologies and their relevance for education in a whole new light.

The phone has become my digital camera for camp happy snaps. I can upload the pictures easily to my computer for the blog I am writing for the parents. It’s even taken video of my daughter’s efforts on the giant swing. It’s my instant weather update. In the heat we are experiencing I am able to check the CFA updates to see if fire conditions might be an issue for us. I can stay connected to school and my online network through the access I have to email and twitter. If I wanted to, I could read Macbeth or A Christmas Carol (or any other out of copyright book!)  through the Stanza application. I can access the iPod within it and listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the tent my Just Light application is acting as a torch so I can locate what I need in the dark. The Google Maps application assisted us on the first day when our bus driver got lost and we couldn’t find the camp location. Google got us there!

Why on earth wouldn’t any student who has one of these powerful tools in their pocket not be using it in classrooms today? Why would any school ban them from access to information they can use for the course they are studying? My iPhone has been configured to my school’s network so that it will tap into it when I’m there. My thinking is that we should be doing the same for the students. Rather than ban, let’s embrace and support them in using these tools to their maximum potential. I know that I have only tapped the surface of what it can do. Can’t wait to see what more I can learn.