West Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Sharing Good Practice Event

 

Following my longest ever commute to work. (Got up in Vienna at 4.45am, taxi to train station, train to airport, flight to London, flight to Edinburgh, bus to car, drive to Livingston - I finally arrived at the conference venue a whole hour before my presentation was due to start.)

Jenny MacNair (Whitecraig Primary School) and I had been asked by Veronica Brunton (our East Lothian Curriculum for Excellence Development Officer) to present on some of the work we had been doing in the Musselburgh Cluster on Games Based Learning.

We concentrated on some of the philosophy behind computer games in education, web-based computer games for home learning and our Guitar Hero Transition Project. I also briefly spoke about some of the work we have been doing with Nintendo DS’s in maths and modern foreign languages.

The slides that we used in Fridays presentation are embedded below:

Guitar Hero Transition in East Lothian

View more presentations from olliebray.

 

 

We also referred to the following links:

Autocollage – A great way to make fantastic pictures from Microsoft Live Labs.

Some examples of web based games that can be used for home learning:

• Classic Sim City – Useful for teaching about towns, cities and settlement.
• Ordnance Survey Map Games – Good for homework.
• Fantasy Famer – Manage a farm for a year
• Stop Disasters Simulator – Can you protect the world against floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and other nasty stuff?
• Sim Sweat Shop – What is it really like working in a sweat shop in a less economically developed country?
• An idea for setting web based games for homework activities

Games Based Learning to help Transition between Primary to Secondary Education:

• The Musselburgh Grammar School Guitar Hero Transition Project – Background Information and Timeline
• MGS Guitar Hero Transition Project – Part Two: The Virtual Battle of the Bands
• Guitar Hero Showcase: I love it when a plan comes together!
• Musselburgh Guitar Hero Project Features in the Times Educational Supplement
• Cluster Project that plays to all talents.
• SLF 2008: Enriched Assessment for Enriched Enquiry
• Download lesson Guitar Hero Lesson Plans and other resources
  

In East Lothian we are rolling out this project to all P7 classes across the county. The 2009 version of the project will use Guitar Hero World Tour for the XBox. World Tour is particularly good as their is more than one instrument, which provides more choice of students. 

Other Links:

• I recently gave a more detailed presentation on Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools at the NAACE 2009 Strategic Conference. You can view the on-line handout and slides for this presentation here.

• Learning and Teaching Scotland Consolarium
• Learning and Teaching Scotland
• Ideas Network Scotland: Innovation and Development in Education