Climate Change Talks

Previously I've enjoyed releasing something good on GoogleEarthDesign's birthday (It was 3 this week) so here's my latest big idea:

Climate Change Talks: A quick search of the internets revealed no one has done a set of video clips on climate change for education (apart from illegal snippets of 'an inconvenient truth') so I decided to do some. Some of the later ones are matched to the UK A level Edexcel curriculum. Here's the first one on the topic 'Is the Earth a Super Organism'.

It's better viewed in HD

Format: Climate change as a topic requires discussing abstract ideas such as positive and negative feedback as well as map based graphics so I went for Prezi.com as an alternative to PowerPoint and added clips of GEarth tours where useful. When a lot of your presentation isn't actually spatial its better not to base your content totally in a GEarth tour as it presents difficulties. E.g. importing, sizing and adding labels to an image in Prezi is a snap with lots of drag and drop controls whereas its a pain to do as an image overlay in GEarth.

Having said that, some of the other clips I have planned which are completely spatial in nature will be done just as GEarth tours and recorded as YouTube clips.

Here is the original prezi page:

(navigate by using the plus minus buttons that will slide out if you mouse over the right hand side or use mouse wheel and click and drag)

Climate Change 1: Is the Earth Alive? on Prezi

It's rather like viewing a GEarth file after watching a tour of the content. In the bottom left corner of each frame it has links to related topics that don't feature in the talk.

Death to PowerPoint: Lots of people have criticised PowerPoint for its slide analogy format, I think you can still do some useful stuff with it but I see their point. The nice thing about Prezi is that I can produce a mind map like poster and then take you around with added audio by recording it with demo software (I use Camtasia 7).

Pros:

• I like the zoomable interface idea Prezi shares with GEarth tours
• Prezi is very usable and Camtasia is not bad
• Doing it this way I like the way I can be discussing one set of points but adding arrows to link back to earlier slides of content.

Cons:

• Using 3 bits of software is a drag (GEarth, Prezi and Camtasia 7) and is time consuming
• I don't like the way Prezi.com promotes the idea of rotating text all over the place, I've heard reports it makes people feel sick.

Video Clips in Education: I had a long think about how to present this content and I thought it worth listing my inspirations:

• Hans Rosling: Excellent speaker with great use of technology
• Lawrence Lessig: Great speaker, interesting and unique style but I'm not sure I like how linear it is.
• Ken Robinson: Amazing, totally absorbing using just his voice. Good to remember that technology is not what makes a great talk, its the talk itself and the speaker.

Very interested to hear what people think.