james-greenwood.com » posters

Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating

James — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:28:31 +0000

I’m pretty much done with tweaking the new look of the site, though I would still appreciate feedback if you find any issues – can’t be sure I’ve got them all!

I’ve added a new option for people who would rather receive post updates via email. You can subscribe to this blog using the By Email link in the top right of the page, or click here.

Some old posts have had a little tweak to make them more accessible, including the system life cycle poster, level descriptors wall display, and famous faces in tech posters. I have also stopped hosting my posters with Box.net because of bandwidth limitations. The original reason was so as not to put too much stress on this server, but that doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue at the moment.

I’m also going to start running a weekly roundup of interesting websites in education & technology that I plan to use in the classroom. I hope to keep it topical, but may throw in some older sites that I’ve found useful. If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to submit them in the comments.

This draws me nicely on to my final point. I set this blog up effectively as a continuation of the conversation on Twitter – very much a two-way street, yet by the very nature of this being a (relatively) static website, it presents information in a top-down way. I’ve had lots of very favourable comments about how the site is useful, and I’m glad to hear that resources I’ve posted here are being used, but I’d like to set out my stall as someone up for collaboration. By combining Debbie Jones’s knowledge with mine for the moral issues in ICT handouts, the finished resource was better than if either of us had done it alone.

So, you can see what interests me plastered across this site, my Delicious bookmarks & on Twitter. If you’re working on something you’d like to collaborate on, or have an idea for a poster but don’t have the software or time to draw it up, drop me a line.

Well, I’ve done it now…

Dotcom millionaires visualisation

James — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:21:08 +0000

Here’s another very simple visualisation showing a breakdown of the top 10 dotcom millionaires under the age of 30. The original list was here – I thought I’d put a poster together to answer the moans and groans from the “ICT isn’t useful” camp of naysayers. Free to download, and hopefully I’ll be able to put up links to a printing company who have offered to sell high quality prints of my posters soon. Until then, enjoy:

Update: 10/08/09

My friend Elliot says you’re all fools. So am I, if it makes you feel any better, but still… I was showing off my latest creation and he looked at it askance before saying, “RBS made a profit of $20k and this douchebag earns $700m? Does he live in a mountain somewhere?”

That’s right, folks… Zuckerberg’s net worth isn’t quite $700m. Facebook’s turnover is.

To those of you who have already printed this, I apologise, and Elliot says “hahaaaaa!”

Oh, and yes… I was listening to Marley when I made it.

The blog was misleading!

Download A1-sized poster (30mb)

ICT quotes posters

James — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:06:59 +0000

It’s freebie time again! Inspired by Will Lion’s excellent “mind bites” series of desktop wallpapers, I started putting together a series of A3 size posters for my classroom wall. These posters include quotes, facts & figures relating to the impact of ICT on society so should make for good display fodder in computer suites.

If there is no citation for images, it’s because they’re from licensed stock collections, or they’re mine. The entire collection (of 17 posters at the time of writing) weighs in at around 145mb with each file being 300 DPI A3 size. I haven’t finished yet, and I’m more than happy to hear suggestions for posters you’d like to see – just add them in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Examples:

Download them individually from here, or download the entire collection as a zip file (192mb).

Update (22/08/09): Thanks to Chris who kindly let me know that box.net impose bandwidth restrictions on their free users. The posters are now available to download from james-greenwood.com as well as box.net. I’m uploading a zip file of the entire collection as I write this.

The impact of ICT: Facebook hits 200 million users

James — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:42:43 +0000

I’m toying with the idea of making a website devoted to resources specifically geared towards developing thinking skills, and awareness of the wider world… I try as far as I can to avoid the “trivial pursuits” Jamie McKenzie argued so eloquently against. Hell, it’s not as if I work hard enough (cough).

Anyhow, thought I’d share my latest effort comparing Facebook users to populations, which I am well aware is like comparing apples with legwarmers, but a fun factlet nonetheless.

Download full-size A3 version here.

Demystifying abstract terms

James — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:48:49 +0000

One of the problems with a subject like ICT is relating seemingly abstract terms. In a recent discussion about storage & computer memory, I found some of my Key Stage 3 students had little concept of the units of file size. After a little while we established that a kilobyte was bigger than a byte, a megabyte was bigger than a kilobyte, and a gigabyte was bigger than a megabyte, but that was about as far as it went.

As a result, I decided to put together a poster to explain the largest unit of measurement we deal with at the moment, the terabyte. As our school network has 6Tb storage capacity, it’s a nice figure to do some number crunching with.

Using a handful of web-based facts such as Internet traffic in 1993, and my own calculations based on freely available information, I came up with this:

I hope to get this printed out at A1 size using my school’s large format printer and include a dramatic unveiling of the figures in a lesson dedicated to finding the answers to the questions posed. For example, using the Harry Potter point, students would have to:

Find out how many CDs comprise the entire Harry Potter audiobook collection (103 – available from Amazon.co.uk)
How many minutes an audio CD can hold (74 mins)
The minute-to-megabyte ratio of MP3 compression (using 128kbps is roughly 1Mb to 1min)
How many times the entire collection can fit on a 1Tb hard drive (therefore how many gigabytes in a terabyte; how many megabytes in a gigabyte)

Download the 300DPI A1 poster freely here.

Working to levels 4 & 5

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:30:16 +0000

Two A1-size posters. Working to levels 4 & 5 has details from the level descriptors, as well as four A4-sized spaces for exemplar work. View preview, or full size.

Plan, do, review shows a simplified version of the systems life cycle. View preview, or full size.

System life cycle poster

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:47:47 +0000

System life cycle

A1 size, jpeg format – 5000 x 7000 pixels. 5.6mb: click here to download.

Level descriptors wall display

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:28:32 +0000

Level descriptors

This is up on my classroom wall printed as 4′ x 16′, printed at 130 DPI. The actual file weighs in at 16.9MB in high quality jpeg format; 29,000 x 3,000 pixels.

Click here for the 300 x 3108 preview, click here for the full-size version. Free for you to use, share & modify however you like. If you’d like a large-scale printed version, we can print them using our uber printer at my school. Tweet me if you’d like one; we can print them for around £45… I’ll get a firmer idea of cost if anyone’s interested.

Famous faces in tech posters

James — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:21:47 +0000

I’ve been meaning to share an awful lot of the resources I put together earlier in the year, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to get it done… I’ll be posting classroom posters & level descriptors tonight, starting with my famous faces in tech wall display. I’ve uploaded them as jpeg files to avoid the nasty compression that seems to come with PDFs on my computer, regardless of how I tinker with the settings; they’re A3-sized, with all of the ones post-1950s in colour. It’s been pointed out by a few people that there aren’t enough women in the timeline – if any of you know of some famous female computer scientists, let me know, but it’s been a man’s industry up until recently!

Famous faces in tech

Download the posters individually, or download the entire collection as a .zip file (83mb).