Be Creatively Subversive with Windows 8

Its very often the case in education that we stumble across things by accident. And as educators, we often get to thinking – “hey, I could use that with my classes”. It’s very often not the way the thing we stumble across was meant to be used, but you know, actually, it could work with students in an education setting if we get creative with our thinking.  I guess this is a kind of  creative subversion (a term first used by Debra Myler back in the dim and distant last decade) and if we look at the Windows 8 tiles, a couple of examples jumped out at me recently. I'm sure I'm not the first to have thought about these, so I apologise in advance if I'm about to steal someone’s thunder.

The first is the Bing Health and Fitness tile. If you swipe through this, loads of teaching and learning opportunities jump out at you. There are the workouts for different times and places. Great for PE, obviously, but also for the life sciences as well. I mean why would you have a different work out when you are in a hotel to  the one you might use at your desk or even in bed? There are some fab fitness workout and individual exercise video clips too. Then consider the opportunities for cross curricular project work; the exercise, health and diet tracking tools are a really cool way to engage youngsters with really important health and well-being life skills.There’s shed-loads of useful info about healthy foods, additives and nutrition as well.

Continue swiping and you come to a section

which allows you to explore every part of the human body in 3D,and in incredible detail (some schools and colleges pay big bucks for software which does this – but this app comes free with Windows 8 …  happy days! ) as well as pretty detailed information on some common diseases and medical conditions.

The second example is the Bing Travel tile. Swiping through this opens up the world right in front of your students without having to leave the classroom! Not only do you get a huge list of destinations, but  wonderful 360 degree ‘panoramas’ of the chosen location to explore.

For each destination, you get loads of useful information including up to the minute weather reports, historical information, useful guides and even currency exchange rates. used in conjunction with Bing maps, this is surely a fantastic free resource for schools? Have your class plan trips around the world, compiling their itineraries in One Note workbooks and with more detailed research about each stop on the way like local flora and fauna, customs and traditions, national dress and foods. Plot the changing weather conditions on an Excel spreadsheet and graph the data, working out averages, means and other statistical measures like distance travelled and flight times. What about the cost of the trip,and currency conversion calculations? Get them working on group presentations as slideshows or even movies with narration and soundtracks relevant to each stop along the way. 

I’m pretty sure there are loads more things that could be done with each tile. And I’m pretty sure the developers had more than a sneaking suspicion that their apps would find their respective places in the classroom.

Creative subversion is a term I've liked to use for many years to describe what we do as teachers and educators every day. Here it is with with Microsoft Windows 8 in action! And how many other ways might there be? I'm off now to carry on exploring….

(Images are, of course, from Microsoft’s Bing apps )