Islay ICT: Architecture Centre Network -ACN

At the end of this month I am off to London. Myself and Tassy Thomson from The Lighthouse. We have been asked to run a workshop for Architecture education staff from around the UK.

This is not the first time myself and Tassy have worked together. In fact we are old friends.

The invite came about from working on a workshop last summer in Finland courtesy of The Alvar Aalto Institute. Where we developed resources to allow young people to explore the built environment. I suggested using ICT (no surprise) to record what the young people experienced.

Therefore we have asked to give examples of cheap ways of using ICT to work with young people.

One thing I am keen to do is to get the pupils on Islay to get involved. I have ask 3 pupils to demonstrate the use of sketchup/Google earth via Video Conference and a bridge to the Internet.

Tassy has suggested getting the participants to come up with an educational project proposal using the skills introduced during the workshop and getting feed back from the pupils on Islay. I think this a great idea. It has several outcomes. The first and most obvious is that the participants will take away some real and practical but to me the idea of pupils on a Scottish island telling people in London how to do something and having their opinion listened too is a huge psychological switch. This will boost the confidence of the pupils and make the big city people think wider in how and who they work with.

The app's we will introduce are:

Sketchup 3d modeling app which can place buildings into

Google Earth

Picassa Cataloguing app but has some simple image editing

The Gimp full blown image editor – Shame about the name

Audacity – powerful sound editor

Freemind – mind mapping app

Photostory – simple app to create sound, image based video

Westpoint Bridge Design – engineering bridge solutions

Pre installed Windows

Moviemaker

Pre installed Apple