Tomorrow's World - A podcasting project with Year 7

Early next term, I’m working with groups of Year 7 students from Colton Hills Community School in Wolverhampton. In common with several of the Secondary schools in the city, Colton Hills have moved to an integrated curriculum for their Year 7 classes, with different half-termly themes for learning. Next half-term, the theme is “Tomorrow’s World”. Discussion with class teachers led to the idea of the students creating “future news” broadcasts, in which the students would imagine that they were hosting a radio show in the year 2100, looking back on world and local events since the Year 2010. It was now my job to pad out this concept into a creative learning experience designed to last 4 hours.

Here were my initial thoughts about the project:

• The project should be about more than just writing and recording a fun podcast / news broadcast

• It should challenge the students to really think about the future and about how technology and what we think we do know about the future (for example, the likely effects of global warming) will change things

• One of the best ways to think about these issues is to look back in history at the changes and trends over the last 100 years. This should include an analytical element, so that students are looking beyond a simple list of historical events at some real data.

• Any predictions we make are likely to be wrong! We can have fun looking back at wacky predictions from the past.

• Personal histories help to give a perspective on world historical events. What were the lives of average people like? What might they be like in the future?

With these as my starting points, here is the outline of the sessions I have planned. This is a work in progress, and I would love to hear new, interesting ideas to modify what I have so far.

Part 1 - Providing a context / Establishing the challenge

The students will be given a context for the day:

You are a radio presenter working for the radio station "Radio CLC" in the Year 2099. You have been asked by the Director of the station to produce a show looking back on 90 years of history since the end of 2010. Your show will include interview(s) with key characters from the century, and archive footage of the events as they occurred. You will need to think about: 1) the name for your show 2) which events you are going to report on 3) what style of presentation you will use 4) who you are going to interview.

The students will be divided into groups for the session. The first task will be to create a list of success criteria for the project. Each group will contribute ideas to a shared canvas of post-it notes at http://en.linoit.com (Lino It!) under one of three headings:

1. What we will have done (the process)
2. What we will have created (the product)
3. What we will have learned.

We will discuss their ideas and condense into a short list of criteria for success. I will drop these into a Google Form for evaluation at the end of the project. We will return to this Google Form at the end of the day to evaluate the success of the project.

Part 2 - How has life changed in the last 100 years?

Making any form of prediction about the future is going to be difficult. One method of contemplating the future is by looking at the past. What events have happened over the last 100 years? What “types” of events have occurred: natural disasters, great personal achievements, technological changes and so on?

Simultaneously, the lives of "average" people have changed alongside these landmark events. I am fortunate to have access to a photographic history of a family throughout this time; my own. My father has spent the last 7 or 8 years actively researching our family history. Three years ago, I helped him to compile his findings into a website at www.bobanderson.co.uk. Combining major historical events with these “personal” histories we have something that looks like this:

World and Family Events: 1900-2010 from Richard Anderson on Vimeo.

(This film was created in Timeline3D, a piece of Mac OS X software that came in a bundle deal a couple of years ago).

My idea is to look through the timeline with the students and compile a list of the kinds of events that we’ve seen. These “categories” of events will form the basis of the students’ podcasts. I'm imagining that the list will include categories such as:

• Natural disasters
• Celebrity events
• Sporting events
• Technological developments

At the same time, we will focus on the individuals from my family history and imagine how their lives differed from ours in the year 2011. I will focus particularly, on George McCauley, my great grandfather. I have a rather unique video of him:

George McCauley, World Champion from Richard Anderson on Vimeo.

What would George McCauley understand of our lives today? One possible activity here is to look around our ICT Suite - which objects would "make sense" to my great grandfather?

Part 3 - Analysing change

Earlier this year, I became aware of the work and presentations of Hans Rosling, initially through a Twitter link to his TED talk, and later through a BBC4 series called “The Joys of Stats”. Rosling uses fantastic, animated graphics to illustrate demographic changes around the world, showing us with startling efficiency how life expectancy and wealth have changed in different parts of the world, and how our Western assumptions and poorly considered terminology about the “developing” world are decades out of date.

During the Tomorrow’s World session, I'm going to use the following clip:

Initially I’m only going to show Rosling’s introduction, as far as his description of the axes. The students will then open up a Keynote “template” containing the following slides:

Their task will be to analyse what the graphical data shows in the two charts and to describe the changes they perceive to have occurred in the world in the 200 years between them. They will do this initially by adding bullet points to the two slides, then script and record their own audio narrations, using the the Audio Recording tool in QuickTime X, as shown in the following clip:

Quicktime X To Keynote from Richard Anderson on Vimeo.

As show, the audio narration should contain one interesting question arising from the data (not a simple rereading of their bullet points).

We will review their ideas, watching back their presentations and listening to the narrations, before watching the full Hans Rosling clip.

Part 4 - Mapping out the future

Having now considered the past, what do we think will happen in the future? Based on the “categories” of events drawn up previously ("natural disaster" and so on) the students are now going to map out, on paper, the next 100 years of human history. I’ll give the students large sheets of flipchart paper and a metre rule. They will then create a timeline until the year 2100, and will lay out prompt cards (with the headings for the categories of events) onto the timeline, adding quick notes on the proposed “event” beneath each. For example, they might say:

• 2015 - Birth of Prince Arthur, son of Prince William and Princess Kate
• 2042 - The first fully-autonomous human-styled android is commercially released.
• 2073 - The first person walks on the Planet Mars.

By the way, I intend to insist that wars are not part of this future history. I think that 1) decisions by students on the causes of putative wars may be contentious, and 2) don’t believe that the reporting of imagined wars would make for an interesting listening experience.

Before mapping all this out, though, we'll also have some fun looking at (in-hindsight) ridiculous predictions from the past. I found the following website, and will pull out some examples:

• Top 87 Bad predictions about the future

A class discussion may highlight that the predictions seemed perfectly sensible at the time; we need to accept that our own predictions are equally likely to be ... dubious.

Part 5 - Planning a podcast

First, we will revisit the task statement / scenario from the start of the session and the agreed criteria for success. Now it is time to translate those success criteria into

To plan their podcasts, the groups will now work on a mindmap at Mindmeister.com. The setup I have on Mindmeister is of one paid account and a set of free student accounts. Because there is a limit of 3 mindmaps for the free accounts, this setup allows me to hold “template” mindmaps in my paid account and to then share them with the free accounts for the students to work on, removing them once a particular session is over. The mindmapping template for planning the podcast will look like a bit like this:

Part 6 - Recording the podcast

Now, finally, we get to the demo of how we're going to record the podcast using GarageBand. I won't linger on the details here; here's a video from YouTube that goes over the basics.

Part 7 - Listening and evaluating

We will listen to the podcasts. Finally, the students will evaluate their work using the criteria they established earlier, using the Google Form we established at the start of the session. Google Forms can instantly summarise the results of the evaluations into simple charts.

That's the current plan! I'd love to hear any feedback: are there any weaknesses in the current outline? Any other wonderful ideas or approaches I might take?

Update on Dec 30, 2010 by Richard Anderson

I've just come across this site - http://www.howtobearetronaut.com - some wonderful materials there about future predictions. Here is the "Pub of the Future", as envisaged in 1965:

Update on Jan 16, 2011 by Richard Anderson

Last week, two groups of Year Y7s participated in the 'Tomorrow's World' project on consecutive days. Here are quotes from the teacher evaluations:

A fantastic session of activities which successfully prepared and challenged pupils of all abilities. Pupils were engaged throughout. The radio podcasts were fantastic! Excellent quality in terms of outcome which EAL and Gifted and Talented pupils could all participate in. Very creative and enjoyable. Reiterates how different tasks can be approached through IT in a creative and engaging manner.

Here are my reflections on the project:

• I didn't really feel that there was sufficient detail and consideration put into the students' predictions; they tended to make quite general, sci-fi-esque predictions - flying cars were popular. England repeatedly won the World Cup! (Which is more likely in the next 90 years? England winning the World Cup or flying cars? Discuss). I don't think we focussed enough on evaluating ideas before recording began. There are certain things that scientists are reasonably certain will happen in this century - the consequences of global warming being the obvious one. We should have spent more time considering them.

• The idea of the pupils creating their own learning objectives, then evaluating their own learning against these objectives at the end of the session (using Google Forms) worked really well. These objective fed into their attitude to the project (especially evident in their teamwork) and gave us a'point of reference' during a couple of mid-session 'mini plenaries' - "How are we doing against our agreed objectives?'

Overall, I was very happy with the outcomes and purposeful atmosphere of the sessions. There's always room for improvement, of course, but I greatly enjoyed working with the pupils, and believe they, and their teachers, took a lot from the experience.