An idea for useing GLOW Games with your class

My S1 Social Education Class will be amongst the first students in Musselburgh Grammar School to experience GLOW after the October break. To get them warmed up at the end of last lesson I showed them GLOW Games. They seemed to really like the games – and I think its important to say that the games are educational and good fun.

This week, I decided to spend the last 20 minutes of the lesson using GLOW Games and also to take the opportunity to ask the class what they thought of the games. The great news is, the games seem to have gone down well. A couple of them compared them to some of the activities that you in Big Brain Academy for the DS and Wii.

Here an interesting thing. This week I didn’t tell the class what the web site was for the GLOW Games – I just told them to find them using Google. It was really interesting to see a couple of the children playing the games via the Law Primary School Blog! (see below).

When I play computer games in class or set computer games as homework exercises I like the class to record their score at the end of the session. I spoke about this at Teachmeet at the SLF. But I thought I would talk through an example of what I meant in practice, using the GLOW Games from today’s lesson.

1) The class open up a Word Document and type their name at the top of it and then make it big and colourful!

2) Next they play the game.

When they are happy with their score they take a screen shot by pressing the ‘Print Scr’ Key in the top right corner of their keyboard.

3) Then they open up a ‘Paint’ Document and edit-paste a copy of the screen (and a copy of their score) into the paint pallet.

4) Using the ‘crop’ tool they select the part of the screen with their score recorded on it and ‘cut’ this out of the paint pallet.

5) They then ‘Paste’ the cropped score box into their word document under their name.

6) As GLOW Games gives you three scores. I then ask the class to add up all their scores and to type their total into their word document.

7) I check their work and then let them print it.

8) At the end of the lesson we put all of the print outs on a table, gather round and arrange them in order from the highest score to the lowest score. I explain to the class that this is a bit like the ‘Top Gear’ Leader Board.

9) There homework is to bring in a screenshot of a better score for the leader board.

Comments

[Almost American]

Ooh - even without being able to login and take a real look around, GLOW looks great! I'm jealous - I wish we had something like that here!