Sometimes you see something so many times you just don’t see it. This tree is in the field at Thomas Estley Community College.

This page shows the same tree from (almost) the same location at different times of the year. The pictures on this page are low resolution – this helps the page load much faster in your browser.

If you’d like the high resolution version, simply click on the picture – this should open the original file. You should then be able to right click and ‘save as’ to save any of the pictures for your own use.

Winter

Spring

Late Spring

Summer

Autumn

The autumn picture was taken in early autumn – the windy weather suggested that the leaves would be gone very, very quickly.

Can you help by adding any information or descriptions I could use here?

All these pictures are free for you to use under creative commons.

Please add the following text somewhere on pages where you use the pictures.

Pictures provided under Creative Commons Attribute. Originals can be found  http://www.systemed.co.uk/2011/09/life-cycle-of-tree/ 

Can photosynth help with a simple maths lesson? And can technology be used in a way that would be nearly impossible without it?

The video below was created with PhotoStory 3, using images from Paint and Cropper. The websites are Photosynth and the Ordnance Survey links in Bing Maps.

The links given at the bottom of this post are direct links to the websites required. In order to run the Photosynth you may need to download Silverlight when / if prompted.

The Video

The websites

Photosynth of the quarry

Direct link to Bing Maps / Ordnance Survey

Is this helpful,and can you use it in your own class? How would you add extra investigation work?

We’re often asked to recommend photo editing software. There are some fantastically powerful packages available with learning curves to match. Sometimes a few simple modifications are all that is required.

If you have Office 2003 or 2007 installed, then it’s very likely you have Office Picture Manger.

Here it is..

On my desktop I have a photo – let’s call it before. If I right click the relevant icon and select ‘open with’ then one choice is Microsoft Office Picture Manager

This opens the picture, ready to edit (click the picture to see fuller copy)

The picture is looking a bit washed out (Whernside in Summer rarely tends to offer a clear view of anything).

Looking on the top menu we can see the edit pictures button – along with auto correct and the (pretty essential undo button).

Auto-correct often does a reasonable job

Clcik the undo button then select edit picture for more options

The controls are now on the right hand side of the screen.

In this case some changes to the brightness, contrast and midtones gives a fairly resaonable improvement

The result

There are many more options in the colour correction options. (being colour blind, I tend to concentrate on brightness and contrast!).

If you have Office Picture Manager – it is certainly worth a look.

In a previous blog post I had a look at Bing Maps and 3D. Since then it has developed quite a lot and there are some fascinating additional tools.

Bing incorporates Multi-Map and so has access to the Ordnance Survey data. In addition, through various features, 3rd parties have now added additional facilities to Bing Maps.

Try these on your own information (your school, your next school visit) and see if they help.

Bing Maps 3d is a download from here and installs fairly quickly. When you first use it you are taken to a web page as shown below

If you’ve used Bing Maps you’ll notice that there are a few extra icons on the screen

It’s easiest to get near your area of interest before using the new tools – and then to get to the 3D facilities select ‘Birds Eye’.

It seems that Bing then layers the aerial photographs on to the contour data from the Ordnance Survey datasets to create the 3D pictures.

Here’s Bing 3D of Croft Quarry –

Here’s the same view using the ‘National Grid’ Map App by Alistair Aitchison

The coloured squares on the screen correspond to the relevant National Grid square size.

Could Bing Maps 3D and the Grid tool be useful in your school?

The tool seems to work better in Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 than it does with Chrome browser

A few days ago I showed one of my flickr pictures to some teachers. The picture below had the caption that one thousand pounds invested in 1888 could be worth over £4 million now – if left alone at something like 7%.

Over that period 7% is a reasonable estimate. (remember the mortgage rates in 1994?).

And the calculation is easy to do with Windows Calculator.

To show how it works imagine we have £100 invested at 10%.

At the end of the year we have £100 plus 10% of £100 (£10) – which makes £110.

At the end of year two we now have £110 plus 10% of £110 (£11) – making £121.

Another way of saying ‘add 10%’ is to say multiply by 1.10

Our money is growing by 10%(the interest) multiplied by itself – like so -

Final money = £100 multiplied by 1.10*1.10 = £121.00

1.10 * 1.10 is 1.10 squared, which is often shown as 1.10^2 (in this case 2 = number of years)

Seven per cent interest for 2 years would be 1.07*1.07 or 1.07^2

7% interest since 1888 would be 1.07^years or 1.07^123 (number of years between 1888 and 2011).

Here’s Windows calculator – this is going to take a lot of tapping in – unless you click the view button and select scientific

Now you can see a button showing x^y. In our case x is 1.07 and y is 123. Simply type 1.07

press the x^y button

type 123

press the equals button -

What is shown here is the compounding effect on £1 – the effect on £1,000 is to multiply the answer by 1,000.

We recently received a domain renewal notification for one of our domains. We’d seen these before and realised then how easy they were to fall foul of.

The BBC news website has a story including mail like this. The figures involved are frightening – Police say an estimated £3.5bn is scammed from UK citizens each year, and about £2.4bn of this is believed to be as a result of mail scams

The images below are from last year’s “opportunity”. This year the prices have increased to £25, £40 and £75 respectively.

Here’s a copy of the first letter I received from the ‘Domain Renewal Group’. It looks very official and it looks just like a bill. So much so that when I put it on the desk at work, one of our folks was quite happily going to process it.

The attached image really is worth looking at – I have obliterated a few personal details.

The terms and conditions are very worrying. The section on ‘Credit Cards’ shows their true colours. $200 re-instatement if you run a credit card charge back which they can charge ‘solely at our discretion’. Here is a pdf of their Terms and Conditions for Internet Scam Fortunately Adobe Reader has a zoom facility

Their address is certainly worth a look at ..
56 Gloucester Road – is simply a mailboxing company (The BBC site refers to ‘Virtual Offices’).

Post moved and revised June 25, 2011 (original post 28th June,2010)

Do you have similar experiences – and what could those consequences have been?

I was at a business training session with an internet specialist yesterday. It was an excellent session with fantastic people.

In the session, we analysed a few of our own websites. On one of the websites we spotted spelling and grammar mistakes.

Is this important, or were we being a bit too picky?

This page from the BBC shows just how important this is.

Photo (c) www.sarahmcsharry.co.uk

These instructions will show you how easy it is to use these fonts with Windows 7.

Download the font – this gives you 2 folders in the download area

Assuming that the _MACOSX is for MACs – then extract from the other folder

Now double click the ‘OpenType font file’ – the font displays on screen and is now available for use.

Click the install button – and carry on.

Often when writing a blog post, you want to put a quick link in to something you’ve done before.

WordPress 3.1 has a new feature called ‘Link to Existing Content’ – which is only available in the visual editor. What if you want embed code and a link to existing content? (The embed code only works with the html editor).

Here’s how to do it -

Do the links to existing first (in the visual window)

Let’s make this post refer to the Finding Duplicate Files.

In the visual editor I selected the phrase ‘Finding Duplicate Files’ above, clicked the link button and selected ‘Link to Previous’.

Now – I want to embed an Ordnance Survey map of the school – which I can get from Bing Maps.

In order to embed the code I need to switch to HTML mode and select the share feaure from Bing Maps.