Thought 1: I posted several months ago about some unusual school settings, but mostly, as I travel, I find school is school the world over. Classrooms look pretty much the same. Fortunately we find some very noteworthy exceptions. But below you will see a pano of an abandoned school room in Russia. How many school rooms have you been in that looked very much the same as this?
Thought 2: I love photography. I also really enjoy 360º panoramic photography. I would love to see some 360º panoramas of schools. In fact, why not make a virtual tour of your building using this technology? New students to the school would be able to learn their way around the building before ever walking into the school. (You might want to password protect access to these for security reasons.) You can check out this pano from Mabry Middle School.
For those who are not really familiar with what a 360º pano is, you can explore the two included below. The first comes from an awesome site started by the Martin brothers in 2007, 360cities.net, that is well on its way to becoming a repository of 360º virtual tours of the planet. Social studies teachers, this is good stuff! 360cities is off to an amazing start with over 15,000 panoramic images that are also linked into Google Earth. The site's browser plugin absolutely rocks, especially on really large monitors--think interactive whiteboard here. And now they are hosting panoramas up to 65,536 x 32,768 pixels in size. That's really, really big! Check out their YouTube video to get a sense of what the Martin brothers are doing.
Jeffrey and David are presenting about their work on May 21, 2009, at Where2.0.
Click on the word "Fullscreen" on each pano to have an immersive experience. Remember you can zoom in/out using your keyboard, and you can click and drag in the picture with you mouse to move around in the image. The antithesis of the school room pictured below, in the world according to Tim, classrooms need to be interactive and immersive places that provide saturated engagement in deep, relevant curricular issues that just gobble up every child's attention span.
Inside abandoned school (floor 2). Physics. (Marino) (2009) in Russia
