They may not be as good as previous sets, but they’re good discussion-starters & easily-printed A4-size. I used the excellent free font Quicksand to create them, and some simple vectors combined with facts & figures gathered online and from Wired Magazine’s Wired Index segment. I tried to steer clear of predictions & easily-outdated figures where possible.

26 A4-sized posters in PNG format. Download the collection in a .zip archive here.

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:

Download A1-sized poster (30mb)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 entire collection as a .zip file (83mb), or check out my other posters.