OllieBray.com

K-12 On-Line Conference 2009: Computer Games in the Classroom

The 2009 K-12 Conference has been as successful as ever and now its my turn to contribute to this years programme. My presentation 'Using computer games to enhance learning and social interaction' goes live over on the K-12 site at 12.00h (GMT) today. This automated post provides a bit more background on the project that I describe and also gives a few more links.

Please feel free to leave any feedback below or over on the K-12 Conference Ning. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can although I’m out and about a lot at the moment so it might not be straight away.

Background and Introduction

The project was inspired by some early work carried out in Aberdeenshire by Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium.
 
The idea behind the project is to use commercially available ‘off the shelf’ computer games that have been built for entertainment and then retrofitted for education. By their very definition commercially available games (due to their high production budgets) tend to be more engaging and cheaper than games that have been build solely for education. The challenge is finding the right games that are suitable for use in the classroom.

Another underlying principle of the project is that in order for quality learning to take place there must be a combination good pedagogy from the classroom teacher combined with activities that are either interesting or engaging. There is a distinct difference between what I mean by interest and engagement. Learning will quickly blossom if a child’s natural interest in a topic is combined with good teaching. Unfortunately many global education systems require children to have specific knowledge or specific skills that they find un-interesting. This is where teachers need to find engaging ways to deliver the content. Technology including computer games can provide this engagement.

For example the project described below has successfully used the game Guitar Hero as a stimulus to teach literacy, numeracy, art, physical exercise, science and lots of other curriculum areas.

This particular project was also designed to help children have a really positive end to primary school and a really positive start to secondary school during their time of transition. In Scotland (and in many other parts of the world) at transition the children move from having most of their teaching from a single teacher to a system of timetabling in the secondary school where they will be taught by perhaps 8 or 9 different teachers.  It is widely recognised that transition and movement between primary to secondary school can be problematic for many pupils and can lead to conflict. Appropriate computer games can provide the ideal medium to reduce conflict within schools at they are competitive but in a non-threatening environment.

Further information about the project is below:

Thinking out of the xBox (Using Guitar Hero in Schools)

Purpose

The purpose of the project was to improve the process of transition for pupils moving from primary (elementary) to secondary (high) school through the medium of a three stage innovative computer games based learning project.

Aims

The aims of the project were:

• To improve the process of student transition between primary to secondary school.
• To develop relationships between cluster staff, students and parents.
• To use Guitar Hero as a context for learning within the seven Musselburgh primary schools during the summer term.
• To hold an innovative transition morning at the secondary school based around the game Guitar Hero.
• To use the theme Guitar Hero as a stimulus for discussion when the children moved to the secondary school.
• To develop a different way of updating primary teachers on individual student progress after they moved to the secondary school.
• To prove that school and learning can be fun!

 
Structure of the project

The learning for the project was structured in three main stages:

Stage One – Guitar Hero is used as a context for learning in primary seven (P7).

This learning took place between the Easter holidays and the summer term 2008. Every primary school was given ownership of the project and a number of learning activities occurred. An example of the types of learning that took place are summarised below in this mind map from Stoneyhill Primary School. The mind map was created at the start of the project by the classroom teacher and their class.

As a result of this planning, a number of worthwhile activities took place across the cluster. Some of these activities can be viewed in picture gallery.

 
Stage Two - All of the Primary 7 children visit the secondary school for a transition day to participate in a number of Guitar Hero related activities.

The day was launched and concluded in the school assembly hall. During the day all of the children got to participate in three workshops using a ‘round robin’ rota system.

Workshop One - The Battle of the Bands in the School Hall (1)

There were 10 games consoles set up in the school hall. The children had to compete against someone who they had not met before. The collaboration during this activity was amazing. Senior students supervised the event so there was also an opportunity for new students to ask them questions about life at the school.

Workshop Two - The Guitar Hero Challenge

These workshops were facilitated by the school’s Guidance Staff. In Scotland secondary school guidance staff have the main pastoral / welfare responsibility for children.

The first task was to ask the question, ‘tell me and your class what you have been learning about during the Guitar Hero Project’. As each school took the project in its own direction, it was a chance for the class to communicate with each other about a common interest, swap ideas and learn about the learning in each others’ schools.

The second task was to allow 20 minutes for the whole group to be split into smaller groups of 4/5 people and to come up with a band name, logo and jingle. One of the S6 students commented, ‘I can’t believe it, they have just come up with that in 5 minutes.’

Logos and jingles had to represent the interests of the whole team (eg: it was work about themselves). The finished products were photographed and videoed and the results were shown at the end of the morning.

 
Workshop Three – Peer Led Activity

Each practical set, for the following year, had an opportunity to participate in a different activity. All of the activities had a different theme related to rock music or to the game. The idea behind this was to make the most of the senior pupil expertise from the secondary school, but also to capitalise on the peer led experience. The senior students were briefed to speak to the young children about the sorts of things that they might be embarrassed to ask adults. Things like where the toilets were, how much money to bring to the school, if they would be allowed out at lunchtime or not, etc...

 
The peer led activities included:

• Guitar Hero Orienteering – using maps of the school to navigate around the school grounds to find the name of rock bands and answer the bonus Guitar Hero Questions.
• Deigning a CD Case – using Microsoft Publisher.
• Designing a guitar – using Photoshop
• Rock Drama – mime and improvisation to rock music in this workshop. It was great to see four different schools collaborating and working together in almost perfect sequence.
• Rock Dance – Led by S6 Student.
• Meet the Band – Working with an S6 band and learning how to play ‘Smoke on the Water’ on the guitar as well as getting a tour of the MGS recording studio.
• iTunes Challenge – A numeracy related quiz using Activote.

Displays - During the day there was also an opportunity for schools to display some of the Guitar Hero Work that they had produced over the last few months. It was all outstanding!


Stage Three – Guitar Hero in the Secondary School

The final part of the project took place between the start of term and the October break 2008. The children were tasked with designing Guitar Hero Postcards and then sending them back to their old primary school teacher. The postcards were produced in CDT and the content was written in English. 

Subject teachers were also tasked to use ‘Guitar Hero’ as a context for discussion with their new classes.
This simple activity not only put closure on the project but was also a very powerful learning experience. It also developed increased communication between the primary and secondary school.

The quality of writing on the postcards was also outstanding as the children were writing with a real purpose. This was able to be used by the high school staff to provide formative feedback to students.
 

Evolution of the Project

Local Scale

The evaluation of the 2008 Guitar Hero Transition project was so positive that East Lothian Council decided to copy the model and roll the project out across the education authority. During the summer term of 2009 all six clusters (that’s a total of 46 schools and over 70 xboxes in classes!) were involved in a new phase of the project based on the original Musselburgh model.

The Musselburgh Cluster staff were involved in training the new P7 teachers and working with each of the secondary schools to promote games based learning as a context for transition.

The project will continue in 2010 this time adding an international dimension to the work by networking xboxes. We hope this will provide an interesting way for children to learn about life in other countries, contribute to the breaking down of cultural difference and introduce an exciting way to learn about other topics such as time zones, location and place. Agian this new section of the project will have a strong literacy focus.

Wide Reach

The project blog have been successful that now other schools elsewhere in Scotland, UK and internationally have started to mirror the project and adapt it for local need. An additional project website was set up to support the larger 2009 project and web stats for both sites show that lesson material has been downloaded all over the UK and a number of other countries including the  USA, Australia, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong.

Awards and Recognition 

The project has won a number of awards including:

• Winner Microsoft UK Innovative Teacher Forum - Feb 2009
• 1st Place Microsoft European Innovative Teacher Forum (Innovation in the Community) - April 2009
• 2nd Plave Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teacher Forum (Innovation in the Community) - November 2009

If you have further information about the project then please get in touch.

UK Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference 2009

Yesterday along with Con Morris (National CPD Team) and Joe Wilson  (SQA) I traveled down to Birmingham for the Microsoft UK Innovative Teachers Forum and Conference.

This is the first time that Partners in Learning have run a conference like this as part of the UK forum and it was a really good event. It was also free for anyone to attend and a great day of quality professional development with a bunch of very enthusiastic teachers.

The event was opened by Steve Bewsick, Microsoft UK. I met Steve last year in Reading and it was nice to meet him again and listen to him open the conference.

The morning keynote was given by John Davitt who did a really great job of getting the day off to a positive start. I’ve seen John present before and really enjoy his style and humor. Amongst other things he demonstrated the Learning Score and of course his Learning Event Generator (LEG) and the iPhone version the Random Activity Generator (RAG).

If you have not seen or heard of the LEG or the RAG before have a read of this post from Stuart Ball and if you want to find out more about John here is a really nice article about some of his work that was published recently over on Merlin John’s site as part of the Innovators series.

After the keynote I had a chance to look around some of the Innovative Teacher projects that were on display. All of the work was very impressive and it was nice to chat to such dedicated and enthusiastic teachers who were all very obviously passionate about learning.

I had a second dose of John Davitt for my morning workshop where we were challenged to complete one of the random activities generated from the LEG. My group had to produce ‘knitting as a role play’.  We had great fun collaborating, gathering props, filming our role play and of course learning how to knit (thank goodness for YouTube!)

After lunch I went to a workshop that was run by Shirelands Learning. Shirelands are doing some interesting work with their first year curriculum (it is now completely thematic). They have also invested heavily in technology. Some of the students from Shirelands showed us some of the work that they have been doing using Microsoft Surface and also Little Big Planet for the PS3.

I particularly liked one of the ideas for Little Big Planet – where Shirlands have re-created their school in Little Big Planet. First year students play to the game to get to know their new school and to learning about their new surroundings. We have a number of Little Big Planet projects starting from the Consolarium in the new year and this might be one of the ideas that we follow up on.

The final part of the day was the UK Innovative Teacher Awards. All of the projects were great but the four projects that will be representing the UK in Berlin will be:

• Dave Rogers (Priory School Specialist Sports College) Pirates and social networking
• Simon Horleston (Howe Dell Primary School) EcoVids    
• Amy Lewis (saltash.net community school) Heroes    
• Jan Webb (Weston Village Primary School) A classroom without walls    

I was particularly delighted to see my good friend David Rogers pick up an award – which was very well deserved. I was also really pleased to see Dave Garland from Saltash.net get a special achievement award for all of the hard work that he has done to promote ICT in Schools.

So, overall a great event and one that I hope to have an opportunity to attend in the future…

Curriculum for Excellence, Science, Change and New Technologies (SSERC Conference 2009)

Yesterday I did the Keynote presentation at the Annual SSERC Conference and AGM.

With support from Learning and Teaching Scotland SSERC have done a good job of developing resources and a new interactive website to support the development of the emerging 3-18 Curriculum in Scotland for Science.

It was a real pleasure to be able to speak to the assembled audience. Although I have to admit as non-science specialist I was a little worried about how I might be recived. My brief was to talk about on-line tools and their role in science education.

If you were at the presentation I would welcome your feedback either by leaving a comment below or by sending me an email (contact details top right).

I promised that I would post the slides from the talk, so here they are:

Curriculum for Excellence, Science, Change and New Technologies (SSERC Conference 2009)

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

Here are also my thoughts, notes and links that I referred to during my presentation:


1. Technology always wins

Everyone questions changes to technology adoption – but wide scale technology adoption nearly always wins. The question is more around the speed of adoption and how this relates to the speed of engagement with learners.

2. Its now easy to generate ‘rich’ content – but you need to think about using it in creative ways

It is now easier than ever for teachers to create on-line content that can be used as tools to enhance learning.

Wordle is an example of a generator that provides an interesting way for teachers to work with students to analyze and look at text. Sinclair Mackenzie who writes the excellent blog 'Never Mind the Optics' has recently used a combination of Wordle and blockposters.com to create some key word revision sheets for his classes. He has written about his experience of doing this here.

3. Change

No one likes change. But thing are changing…

The key message (hopefully) from my presentation was that we need to understand how children are changing, technology is changing and how the curriculum is changing before we understand how we should change or pedagogy to support all three of these things.


4. Changing children and young people

I think that children are changing. One of the reasons for this is that I think that now children and young people have increased access to knowledge. This knowledge is normally found via the Internet.

In the past parents, teachers and responsible adults used to the gatekeepers of knowledge. In short we would normally decide when a young person was old enough to know about sex and drugs and rock & roll. This was one of the reasons why we had a curriculum that tried to link essential knowledge with age-and-stage.

In the majority of cases knowledge was often only introduced when it was believed by the professional that a young person was emotionally ready to receive it. There were of course, as with anything, exceptions to this rule.

The Internet and increased use of mobile technology has changed all of this. Now children have access to unlimited knowledge. Unfortunately sometimes children come into contact with knowledge that is unreliable and also content they are emotionally unprepared for. I’m convinced that there is a link between this and behavior in schools – but I have no evidence to back this up.

A recent survey commissioned by Channel 4 looked at the online behaviors of young people between the ages of 12 – 24. In uncovered some interesting statistics that included:

• They personally own 8 devices (including MP3 player, PC, TV, DVD player, mobile phone, stereo, games console, and digital camera)
• They frequently conduct over 5 activities whilst watching TV
• 25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access”
• A quarter of young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are physically with at the time
• They have on average 123 friends on their social network spaces
• And the first thing the majority of them do when they get home is turn on their computer

The questions is what does this mean for schools?

I think that Schools should:

i) Collect their own data. You should know how many children in your school have devices, have internet access at home, have the ability to play an mp3 file etc…

ii) Teachers should have an understanding of the websites that their classes use for school work and for non-school work. They haven’t got to use the sites just have an understanding of what they can do. This knowledge will also contribute to the relationship building between the teacher and the class.

iii) Collect data on student ICT skills. Schools and teachers should know what ICT skills young people have. This is particularly important at the transition between primary and secondary stages. Again data needs to be collected on animation skills, digital video skills, web skills search skills etc…

iv) Make sure that all school staff are adequately trained in Internet Safety and Responsible Use. I find it worrying that young children have so many ‘friends’ on social networking spaces. Schools need to re-define what we mean by that word ‘friend’.

Unless schools do this how will we ever stretch children and set appropriate assessment tasks.


5. Changing Technology

Technology is changing faster than we ever imagined it to. In reality schools will never be able to stay up-to-date and keep up with technological change. But we need to try.

Microsoft recently wrote a report called ‘Europe Logs On’. Where it predicts 5 technological changes that will occur by 2012. In reality these changes are already occurring but there is just not wide scale adoption yet. Schools need to change and adapt resources in parallel to technological change if we want to try to keep up.


Change One: The Three Screens

The distinction between your computer, television and telephone will become more blurred. You will be able to do core functions of all devices on any of the devices. I big step forward in this paradigm was the recent development of TV catch up for the iPhone. I still can’t quite believe I can watch the news on my iphone over my normal phone network.

What should education do in response: Any education content that is developed need to be optimized for use on mobile.

Commercial publishers – please take note.

Change Two: The rise of connected entertainment

You will be able to interact with your media. The BBC red button was just the first step in this direction. BBC iPlayer that allows you to re-watch television programmes that you have missed is another important development.

What should education do in response: We need connected education.

The Climate Mystery by Cogin, Microsoft and the Discovery Channel is the most advance form of connected education that I have seen to date. An education soap opera with a social networking backend to allow real time global collaboration between users. This combined with well thought out mini games to allow a non-threatening but competitive environment for children to learn.

 

Change Three: The whole web will become social.

The web will become more personalized and as much about people as about information. Other people will be used increasing more to filter the information from the web.

What should education do in response: Teachers need to learn the value of the social web

I don’t know very much about science or what resources are good for science teachers. But I have a whole personal learning network that know more about science teaching than I do.

When I was asked to speak at the SSERC Conference I asked on Twitter for some people to recommend resources to me. I was able to make the assumption that because they were coming from people that I trusted that they would be of value in the classroom.

One of the links came from Nick Hood (PT Physics at Glenwood High School in Fife) Nick sent me a link to his delicious links. Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save websites that you find as a list on to another website. Anyone can see your list and it will also tell you if other delicious users have also saved the same link. It’s a powerful way to share peer-reviewed resources amongst teachers. I’ve been using delicious for years and find it incredibly valuable. More info on delicious here.

Here are some of the links I was recommended by my professional learning network before yesterdays conference. I would have never of found them without using the Internet socially:

• Nick Hoods Delicious Links – links to hundreds of other great resources

• BrainPop UK – Great little animations that explain things in a simple way for children. Some BrainPop movies are always free (others you pay for)

• 60 second science podcast – from Scientific America

• Interactive Science Simulations – from the university of Colorado

•  Visible Body – a 3D immersive anatomony and physiology model (30 day free trial)

• 10 Science Apps for the iPod / iPod Touch – Many of these Apps are free

• Science Songs – Different songs about Science topics

• Topic Box Science – Links to other recommended science websites

• 3D mouth – everything you need to know about teeth in 3D form

There were lots more…

Change Four - The 3D Internet

Increasingly you will be able to interact with information and people on the internet in a 3D way.

Many young children (eg: 5 – 8 year olds) are already interacting with the 3D internet. They occupy sites like Club Penguin and Lego Universe. I think it’s unlikely that these children will ever grow into social networking sites like Bebo – that are mainly text based. 3D immersive environments are incredibly engaging for children is if they are used in the right way

What should education do in response: Embrace and prepare for the 3D internet and make sure that staff are trained on the responsibilities of using it and the safety messages that they need to give to young people.

In the Consolarium we are already working a number of 3D Internet projects. CANVAS is currently our flagship project but we have other ideas and projects in development.

WonderVille 3D is a good Canadian example that combines a 3D simulation and static content. You have to navigate around a world to find information and the answers to problems.

There are other good examples of science education in the 3D world that are already available in Scilands in  Second Life. The challenge for us is to now make these environments safe for young people.



Change 5 – The rise of the Smartphone

Internet enabled mobile phones with robust web-browsers will be the norm by 2012. The iPhone and Google’s Android Platform and good examples of current models. I recently read somewhere that my iPhone has more computing power in it that the first Apollo Space mission.

What should education do in response: We need to rapidly consider how we integrate technology like mobile phones into the classroom.

Mobile phones are no longer phones any more. They are mini computers that you can make phone calls on. They can be used to take pictures, record video, record audio, surf the web, download lesson content and there are a variety of powerful Apps that also have strong education value.

Schools teaching Advanced Higher should think about how they can make more use of iTunesU (The ‘U’ is for University). Many university departments (such as Oxford) now give the content of their lectures away for free over iTunesU. School need to make more use of these high quality and free resources.

In my opinion in terms of Science and the use of mobile technology Saltash.net Community School in Cornwall have got a good approach to the use of mobile technology for learning.



6. Changing Curriculum

The Science curriculum is changing. I get a little fed up when we talk about A Curriculum for Excellence and people tell me that they are doing it already. If we are doing it already, why have we wasted all this time and money developing a new curriculum? For me Curriculum for Excellence is about thinking differently and then doing things differently.

It would be unprofessional of me to comment on the content of a science curriculum as I have no expertise in this area. But I do worry that across the Scottish teaching profession that teachers are still thinking in subject boxes. In my opinion schools need to start working in clusters and thinking about how a young person progresses through the 3-18 curriculum. Then we need to think about Curriculum architecture and only then should we start thinking about content. Which takes us back to thinking about 3-18 in a planning clycle.


7. Changing Pedagogy

I think that for good learning to take place there needs to be a combination of good pedagogy and either interest or engagement. I think there is a difference between interest and engagement. If a child is interested in something then combined with the right support from the classroom teacher learning is likely to flourish.

Unfortunately, children are sometime required to learn things that they don’t find interesting and that is when we have to teach things in an engaging way.

Technology is engaging and teachers should think about capitalizing on this as they develop learning activities.

All registered Scottish teachers should already be able to using technology in innovative ways:

    ‘Registered teachers skillfully adopt and deploy a wide variety of innovative resources, including ICT and, where appropriate, the outdoor environment'

(GTCS Standard for Full Registration)

Some possible ways to use technology to engage our students

 i) Use their tools (eg: social networking spaces)


ii) Offer choice of output (written, typed, poster, presentation, video, podcast etc…) the input (planning, drafting, re-drafting, collaboration etc…) remains the same and the most important bit.


iii) Provide a real audience for students work (Wikipedia, blogs with comments, school radio podcast, science television station on YouTube etc…)


iv) Be creative with on-line technology tools. The ones I specifically mentioned were:

Comic Life / Comic Brush (www.comicbrush.com) - I showed an example of a cartoon where a girl is having a conversation with red blood cells.

Pixton (www.pixton.com) - I showed an example of a comic that has been made about Newtons Laws.

WorldWide Telescope (www.worldwidetelescope.org)

A powerful tool to explore the universe and to teach about space.

 

As well as providing a great way to learn facts about the universe. Science teachers should also think about how this could be used in different way. For example wouldn’t Worldwide telescope be a great stimulus for creative writing. Where children imagine want it was like to explore planets and far off lands?


Google Earth (www.earth.google.com)

The days and night feature of Google Earth combined with other layers such as the Earthquake layer have obvious links to science education. Its also worth exploring Google Sky, Google Moon and Google Mars.

GPS and other data can be collected from data loggers can easily be imported into Google Earth to provide a special dimension to any real data collected.

Computer Games

Computer Games again combined with good pedagogy can provide a great contextual hub for learning to teach science. Good games for science education include:

• Endless Ocean – where you can explore the ocean as a diver. There are obvious links to marine biology but also to buoyancy, sea water, pressure, Oxygen, physiology etc…

• Spore – This is a game about evolution and you evolve from a micro-organism to intergalactic planet habitation. Obvious links to biology, diversification, evolution and adaptation.

• World of Goo – a crazy game for the Wii where you have to build things out of…goo. Good for introducing concepts such as texture and viscosity. Also the principles of different forces on structures and you have to build complicated bridges (out of goo) to move between levels.

8. Changing Professional Development

We need new models of CPD to engage with a Curriculum for Excellence. If your interested in this have a look at my Drip Feed Vs Sheep Dip CPD post here.

The future of professional development is on-line, have a look at:

• CPD Find
• Curriculum for Excellence
• Consolarium: Games Based and Innovation in Education
• LTScotland on iTunesU (the ‘U’ is for University)

Also consider reading about the daily practice of other Scottish Science Teachers such as:

• Nick Hood - Mr Hood.net
• Sinclair MacKenzie - Never mind the Optics
• Jaye Richards - Mimanifesto

Feedback

I would welcome any feedback or comments on the above. Please feel free to get in touch (details top right) or leave a comment below.

New Tools for Teachers: BEd Primary Focus @ Edinburgh University

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to the Secondary PGDE Students at Edinburgh University for a few years now. But this week I was given the chance to speak to the BEd Primary Students on ICT in Education.

I’ve been trying to up-date my handout and slideshow for my ‘new tools’ talk for some time now - I’m still not quite happy with it but its getting there and I used it on Tuesday.

If you were at the presentation I hope you enjoyed it and as promised here are the slides and links that I referred to. Please feel free to get in touch and leave a comment if you have any questions.

New Tools For Teachers - Primary Focus November 2009

View more presentations from Ollie Bray.

Main content and links:

1. The use of ICT

Generators

Use generators to liven up your lessons and to set learning / home learning objectives in a more creative way. Some good examples include:

• Fodey – Includes the famous wizard text and the newspaper generator

• Wordle – Turn paragraphs of text into beautiful work clouds (try it with your exam syllabus departmental development plan or anything else you can think of!)

• Smoke Signal Generator - Make smoke signals come out of your location. Imagine if you were learning about Japan and your lesson objective floated out of Japan on a Google Map.
  

2. 21st Century Students

21st century students expect a new level of engagement and they have very high expectations. Many young people now exist in a high tech, multimedia rich and highly glamorized world. We need to be prepared to deal with and capitalize on this in our classrooms.

Tips:

• Think about your own on-line presence (social networking, ex-directory in the phone book, be careful what you post etc…)

• Make sure you know what resources your students have at home. For example how many of them have a computer with Internet access? How many have the capacity to play an mp3 file? How many have a games console? If you don’t know this information how will you set appropriate and imaginative home learning tasks and get a real understanding of prior learning?

• Also make sure you know what skills your students have. Many of their ICT skills will be more advanced than yours. Lots of children have made an animation, edited a video and created a website. Make sure you know what skills your students have . Use these skills to build progression and to extend learning.

• Regularly talk with your students about what websites they use. Not only will this keep you up to date but it will also provide you with opportunities to coach and nurture children and young people in Internet safety and Responsible Use. It is particularly important that primary teachers gain an understanding of appropriate behavior in virtual worlds - this will be the on-line environment that they grow up in. Teachers have a responsibility to keep children safe where ever they are - that includes on-line.

• If you have gathered the above information it will make setting appropriate assessment tasks so much easier.

• There is some interesting research on young people and on-line behavior here.

3. The Basic Tools

Search

Tips and good search engines:

• Use the Advanced Google Search – remember you can use this to get specific file type returns such as just PowerPoint or shockwave flash (animation) files.

• Quintura - provides a really good visual search – excellent to use with children on project work.

• Google News - searches the most up to date news web sites.

  
  

Images

• Don't forget Advanced Google Image Search

• Flickr can provide really good and powerful images that can be used in education. Many of these images are are licensed under creative commons. Which means if properly attributed they can be used in education for non-commercial purposes.

• Flickr Slideshow - this will be the quickest and most powerful lesson starter you ever make. More details here.
  

• Big Huge Labs - make your own motivational posters that are truly cross curricular. More details of how I did it here.
  

• The BBC Day in Pictures – great starter or discussion activity.

• The BBC 3 minute news bulletin – children like to watch the news if you give them the chance!

• Microsoft Deep Zoom - great for creating immerse works and for story telling. More details here.

3. The audience tools

Tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis allow you to quickly publish information to the Internet. Most importantly they can be used as an alternative to traditional assessment and give the children a real sense of audience. Use these tools to make your own World Wide Wall Display.

• Some Good Blogging Tools include

  wordpress, blogger and typepad.

• Audacity is a free audio editing piece of software that will also w you to edit voice and audio recordings. It is also available as a Portable App – which means you can run it off a memory stick.

• Think about getting your students to write Wikipedia articles. Also make sure your students know how to use Wikipedia. I've written in length about his here.

• CANVAS (Children’s Art in the Virtual Arena of Scotland) – Is a new LTS project that will allow children to display artwork in an on-line world. More information here.

4. The Creative Tools

• Comic Brush – On-line comic book creator (a bit like Comic Life – but free!)

• Pixton – Sophisticated on-line comic book creator

• Go Animate – Robust on-line combined on-line / animation software

• Google Earth – Watch my 15 minute mini-note from Teachmeet NorthEast on how to use Google Earth in the Classroom here.

5. Computer Games Based Learning

Good case studies of games based learning available on the LTS Consolarium website.

Here are 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 Farmer – 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

Remember the use of off the shelf games and games consoles can make a massive contribution to education. For more information in the use of computer games to improve literacy have a look at this recent workshop that we ran in the Highlands.

6. Don't stop learning

The future of CPD is on-line:

• Find CPD opportunities using CPD Find

• Record your CPD using CPD reflect

• Download CPD from LTS iTunes U

• Take part in a CPD event in GLOW (eg: Glowing Thursday’s?)

Develop your personal learning network by finding out more about:

• Teachers TV – good classroom and professional development resources

• Slideshare – A place to up-load and view PowerPoint and other presentations

• Microsoft Innovative Teachers Network – join and collaborate with teachers globally

• Twitter - A micro blogging service. You can follow me here.

Follow some other teachers blogs and find out about their classroom practice. For starters try:

Tom Barrett - Primary School Teacher, technology advocate and all round good guy form England

Jen Deyenberg - Primary School Teacher, Technology advocate and GPS Jedi from Canada

7. Finally

If you were at the presentation. Please leave any comments and feedback from the presentation below or get in touch via email (see top right for details).

Africa Safari in Google Earth

Brian McLaren (one of the Consolarium Development Officers) is doing a fantastic job in leading some Games Based learning projects all over Scotland using Wild Earth African Safari – this is a great contextual game with huge potential for  learning.

Tim Rylands had also been doing some work with this game and I recently wrote about this in a separate post.

Anyway, the point of this article is that I recently stumbled across this great Google Earth Tour website that uses Google Earth to zoom in and out of a variety of satellite imagery of African animals – the quality is absolutely superb!

This exercise would be easy to repeat in the classroom and the Google Earth Tour feature of Google Earth means that children could individually plan, write and record narrative to create their own personalized Google Earth Tour.

More information on Google Earth Tours in this YouTube video below:

As you can see from the example it is easy to also easy to embed these Google Earth Tours in blogs and websites using Google Gadgets.

Let me know if you use this idea as part of your practice.

East Lothian Success at Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Education Forum – Brazil 2009

I’ve been back from Brazil now for about 24 hours –I have to admit trying to think at work today was a little bit taxing at times. I will be posting my observations and thoughts on the conference over the next week or two as well as trying to up-date a back log of promised blog posts.

But in the meantime I was delighted that East Lothian (particularly Musselburgh Grammar) was recognized during the Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teaching Awards ceremony and that we were able to pick up second place in the Innovation for Building Community Category.

We were 1st in this same category in the European Awards earlier this year. The project is about using computer games to help children learn and to also provide a context for social interaction as children move between primary to secondary school.

I had a great time in Brazil and met loads of interesting, inspiring and motivated teachers from all around the world.

Merlin John has written about the UK success here.

Digital Games in Schools: a handbook for teachers

European Schoolnet has recently undertaking a major study sponsored by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe on the use of games in schools in Europe. The study included the use of computer games and any online games that run on consoles, computers, handhelds or mobile phones.

As part of the project a book by Dr Patrick Felicia, a researcher at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland has also been bublished.

You can find out more about the book here and also download a copy as a .pdf.

Its full of lots of pictures from Scottish Schools using computer games in the classroom.

Learn Geography for the Nintendo DS

Dreamcatcher Interactive has recently announced ‘Learn Geography’ an educational title for the Nintendo DS. According to the press release it aimed at students between 3rd and 4th Grade in the USA – it doesn’t look like there is a UK version of the game yet?

The game includes the following features:

• Jigsaws - piece together parts of a world map and learn to identify the countries within each continent. There are a number of jigsaw puzzles available for each region.

• Lessons – to help you learn about world geography.

• Timed quizzes and mini games – to test your geographical knowledge.

• Training Mode - to help you practice identifying country names and locations on a world map.

Apparently you work through the lessons as a little green vampire. I think I’ll need to see it before I really pass comment!

(Thanks to the future making serious games blog for the heads up)

Tim Rylands – HHL09 and African Safari

(photo: James Clay)

I’ve heard lots about Tim Rylands and have followed his blog for a long time. Tim is the king of education web links, a clearly a talented teacher, fantastic presenter, PowerPoint Jedi and knowledgeable education consultant. I was lucky enough to meet Tim at Handheld Learning 2009 – I just wish we had more time to chat?

Unfortunately I missed his presentation but I did get a chance to watch the re-run on the Handheld Learning Blip TV channel. The main focus of Tim’s presentation was on the work that he has been doing with the Wii game Wild Earth: African Safari. If you have not played African Safari then it is defiantly worth a look as the education potential of such a resource is outstanding.

Brian McLaren who works as one of our development officers at the Consolarium in Scotland is doing some work with this title at the moment and with time we will get this written up over on the Learning and Teaching Scotland Games Based Learning website.

African Safari is a unique simulation for the Wii based on the PC game from Super X Studios. It is your task to take award-winning pictures of exotic animals in their natural habitats without disturbing them. This includes running with herds of zebra to following hunting lions and scavenging vultures.

The main features of the game include:

• 11 picture-taking missions with both primary and secondary objectives. Inclusding, nvestigating the hyena during a midday thunderstorm, observing giraffes in a hidden valley from a helicopter and meeting a family of elephants as they take care of their young.

• The Wii lets you use the Wii Remote to play from the animal’s perspective in the different games.

• You can come across more than 30 African animals including: cheetah, crocodile, crowned crane, elephant, flamingo, frog, bat, gazelle, giraffe, hippo, hyrax, leopard, lion, ostrich, oxpecker, pangolin, rhinoceros, meerkat, tortoise, trout, vulture, warthog, wildebeest and zebra.

• Multiplayer mode gives players the choice to drive the vehicle or snap photos while playing with anywhere from 1 to 3 friends.

• Photos collected are placed into an animated slide show presentation of informative articles. Players can select their own favorite photos to keep in their portfolio.

• An Impact Meter tracks how much of a disturbance you are to the natural habitat. If you disturb too many animals or get to close to them, your Wii Remote will rumble at varying degrees, making it harder to take a steady picture. If the Impact Meter becomes completely depleted, you fail the mission.

• There are terrific photo opportunities due to the accurately presented flora and terrain from the Serengeti National Park in Africa. This includes shrubs, flowers, kopjes (rocky outcroppings), streams and lakes. The weather also changes through the day

You can view a trailer for the game below (You Tube):

During his presentation Tim games lots of ideas about how he has used African Safari with classes all over the UK. I have embedded the video of Tim speaking at HHL below:

During his talk he mentions the following links, software and web based tools:

• African Safari – for the Nintento Wii (more details here)

• PowerPoint – In particular Tim mentioned how you can write in PowerPoint slides in the 2007 edition, which is useful for note taking within presenations.

• Quotepad - A great tool to take / aggregate  notes from the web or your computer (from anywhere!).

• Vocab Grabber - A great visual thesaurus to get children to experiment with worlds and to improve their language

• Ether Pad - Online collaborative documents – not normally blocked by school firewalls.

• Switheroozoo - A great little website for learning about animals and even creating some of your own – what do you think of my ElicheetaZeb?

• Fighting Maleria - A good website for learning about Malaria and a good example of how very serious citizenship issues can be talked through the medium of computer games.

• Wordle - An old classic but Tim uses it in an interesting way to analyze note taking – watch the video to see how.

The video is well worth 30mins of your time.

Climate Change Resources for Schools - Blog Action Day 2009

 
Today is Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. Bloggers are asked to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the Web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action.

More information about Blog Action Day in this YouTube Video below:

As this years themes is climate change and to show my support I thought I would post five of my favorite climate change resources that should be being used in schools.

1. Google Climate Change Resources

Google has produced a great set of on-line resources in the build up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. This includes a series of YouTube videos and Google earth files.

Have look at this youtube video below to find out more:

This is Google maps mash up for sea level change is also a good old favorite of mine!

2. ZeroFootprint - Kids calculator

A great carbon footprint calculator aimed at children - thanks to Mr Evans for showing me this on his excellent blog.

3. The Climate Mystery

The climate mystery from Microsoft and the Discovery Channel is a great resource and set of mini games. But I can’t quite believe how few schools are using it in the build up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

More information here (you tube video):

Also see my previous blog post for links to resources.

4. LogiCity

LogiCity is a game produced by Logicom and The National Energy Foundation. The game set in a 3D virtual city where players are set the task of reducing the carbon footprint of an average resident. As players work their way through the game they will pick up information about Climate Change, and some of the main ways in which everyone is currently contributing to the emissions of the main greenhouse gas (CO2) that causes Climate Change.

It places students in a virtual environment and lets them experiment and experience the potential effect that individual actions can have on the planet before it's too late. Users can travel to the future to see the direct results of their actions in real time by quickly fast forwarding to the year 2066.

Thanks to the serious games blog for the heads up and original post on this.

5. Learning and Teaching Scotland Climate Change Website

There are some great resources on the LTS Climate Change website that are specifically aimed at Scottish Schools.

Finally, don't forget my melting men idea and what is your favorite resource to teach about climate change in schools?