OllieBray.com

MGS Guitar Hero Project gets write up in Scotsman

A nice write up in today’s Scotsman about our Musselburgh Cluster Guitar hero project. You can read the full article here: http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Award-is-music-to-ears.5120017.jp

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

European Innovative Teachers Forum gets mention on Teachers TV News

Our Musselburgh Games Based learning project gets a mention on Teachers TV News along with some of the other award winning projects that were showcased last week. Including Jeroen Staltiens 'Hollywood in de klas'.

 

(click to view movie)

‘According to a 2006 survey on ICT use in European schools, the UK was at the front with 60% of teachers having access, competence and motivation to use the internet and computers in classroom situations. The EU average was just 38%.’

It’s interesting to reflect on the above quote – often we complain about ICT provision in UK schools. But in comparison to a lot of areas in the world we are not that badly off. Yes there could be some things that are done better, lots of website that should be unblocked but for me its about empowering more teachers to use ICT in a creative and innovative way.

I often use the slide below in my presentations. We need more teachers to take risks!

MGS gets First Prize in European Innovative Teacher Awards!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft European Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna, Austria. More than 150 education policymakers and teachers from 40 countries across Europe attended the Vienna event, hosted by Microsoft, to share ideas, experiences and best practices on integrating technology and innovative teaching into the curriculum.

I had a fantastic week, I listened to some interesting presentations, I was enthused by some great people and won first prize for the Innovation in the Community Category.

This is a great achievement for the UK, particularly Scotland and East Lothian. I also hope that my contribution to the forum last week will start to impact globally on the creative ways that teachers should be using ICT to support learning and to build relationships with children.

My good friend Merlin John (make sure you subscribe to his website) was the first off the mark to get something published on-line and you can read his article here. There is also an official press release from Microsoft about the event here.

I was joined during the last week by the three other winners of the UK Innovative Teachers Forum. Mandeep Atwal (Mandeep also got a 3^rd place in the Innovation in the Community Category for her ‘Young Voices’ project), James Kent (Wales) and Chris Henderson (Saltash.net). They were all fantastic company during the week. The biggest problem is they all gave me so many ideas I don’t quite know where to start!

The UK Contingent was also accompanied by Kristen Weatherby and Stuart Ball, who are responsible for the Innovative Teachers programme in the UK. They have already started to blog about the event – I don’t quite no how they found the time? We were also joined by Sarah Payton and Elizbeth Goodman (from Futurelab) Sarah ran an excellent workshop on the Enquiring Minds Project – I’ll write separately about that and the work we completed.

Finally we were joined by Dan Roberts also from Saltash.net community Collage who delivered an excellent keynote presentations.

I’ll write up more detailed reflection of the event over the next few days. But I would like to publically thank everyone for their best wishes and support over the last week and for award!

In particular, I would like to tank all of the other teachers who were involved in the initial Musselburgh Guitar Hero Transition Project. You were all fully credited within the virtual classroom tour. I would also like to thank the Musselburgh Headteachers for agreeing to take the risk and East Lothian for having the vision to support the scaling up of the project to all 46 schools within the Authority. I can’t wait to be involved in the next stage of the projects evolution!

If your not already a member its free to joint your countries own Innovative Teacher Network.

Google Street View comes to Musselburgh

View Larger Map

Google Street View is now available in some of the big cities of the UK including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. The Edinburgh coverage stretches out far enough to include most of Musselburgh – which will be great news for the teachers at MGS.

Streetview is available as a layer in Google maps that can be activated by dragging the orange man from the left hand side of the map over a road in an area that has been photographed for streetview.

Google maps is a really underused resource in the classroom. I had a cover class the other day and the children were learning about Greenfield and Brownfield sites. The material in the textbook (that had been left by the cover teacher) was a little bit dry so I improved by using Google Maps and talking about the Brownfiled site next to the school and the proposed new Tesco’s development and Greenfiled site that has a planning application on it at the other end of town. The children were very engaged because they could see places they new and we fascinated by the detail. Its another good example of teaching lace and local area.

So just to re-cap the layers in Google Maps are:

Maps:

Satellite (note the imagery is before the school was re-built):

Terrain (I’ve also got the Wikipedia and Images layer turned on here):

Streetview:

Students at MGS making the most of the sun ... and the Wifi!

I snapped this picture yesterday.

Great to see students making the most of the schools wifi. Why shouldn’t learning be anytime and anywhere? Why don’t more teachers let student find different places to learn? Why don’t more schools have better connectivity?

iSynth: Photosynth on the iPhone (Microsoft Live Labs in the Classroom)

iSynth is a great Photosynth viewer for the iphone.

I was showing the Photosynth 3D CDT Classroom to a group of students in the dinner hall today using iSynth on my iPhone. They seemed quite impressed, particularly when one of the students spotted his own work on the wall and we were able to zoom in and take a closer look!

Here are a few iSynth, iPhone screen shots:

The start page:

One view of the CDT room: 

 

On the iPhone / iPhone touch you click on the green arrows to move around the synth. You can also pinch / un-pinch the screen to zoom in and zoom out.

Another view of the room here - I’ve purposely red circled something on the teachers desk, because….

…when you zoom into the detail you can see some of the spare Easter revision timetables that have been left on the teachers desk.

Well I think it’s impressive and when you think about it. A re-creation of your whole school available in a child’s pocket!

MGS Robots

One of our Art Teachers has been making these great robots with his class – I liked them so much I took a photograph and thought I would post it up here! I just think they are great. So great, we put them in the school trophy cabinet.

For their next project the class are going to build the world’s biggest cardboard robot – now all we need to do is find out how big the current biggest cardboard robot is?

Anyone know?

Computer Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools – NAACE Strategic Conference, Blackpool, March 2009

Below are a copy of my slides and on-line handout for the break out session that I ran at the NAACE Strategic Conference in Blackpool on the 4^th March 2009.

A slideshare version of the presentation can be found here.

The links that I referred to in my presentation are as follows:

• Wordle – Create fantastic Word Clouds to brighten up your lessons and also analise important documents.
• Promethean Active Expression – A world class Interactive Voting System.

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

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 instument, which provides more choise of students.

Partnership with Parents:

• Internet Safety and Responsible Use: How to set family settings on games consoles

 

The Use of the Nintendo DS

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?
• Big Brain Academy
• My Word Coach
• Maths Training
• My French Coach
• Hotel Dusk - A good narative driven game to encorage reading and provide a context for other work
• Nintendogs - A great game to provide a context for learning (Aberdeenshire have been doing some fantastic work using this game in P2)
• Drawn to Life - Being used in P3 to develop writing and storytelling skills

The Use of the Sony PSP

Lots of good information on how the PSP can be used for education on the ConnectEd website. Hot Brain for the PSP is a similar to lots of the Brain Training title you can get for the DS. Also have a look at SUMS Online - they make great software for computers and other handheld devicces includeing the PSP.

Storage Solutions for Games Consoles

ConnectEd have made a fantastic storage solution for the PSP – hopefully they will also soon have one on the market for the Nintendo DS.

The Use of the Nintendo Wii

Some of the titles mentioned:

• Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (currently being used in SfL)
• Endless Ocean (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Wii Sports
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympics (A great game to provide a context for learning)
• Dancing Stage
• My French Coach

Graphic Novels

• Classical Comics
• Manga Shakespeare

The Play Station:

We are currently using Buzz the Schools Quiz and are looking forward to evaluation Buzz the Hollywood Quiz as soon as we get a copy? I am sure that there will also be Education Version of Buzz for the PS3 coming out at some point?

Games Design

• We have a site license for Mission Maker and will be exploring the possibilities for using this game to develop literacy and International links over the next 12 months.
• 2Simple DIY is also an excellent game for encouraging games Design in the early years. (you can see my efforts here)

Exergaming:

• Wii Sports
• Dance Mats (Zig Zag Dance Mats)
• EA Active Sports Coming Soon

Other Links:

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

The ELIS Cow!

It’s been a crazy day at school today and really was a day of meetings - face-to-face and over the phone. I had to pop out this morning to visit one of my case load who is doing really well at the East Lothian Inclusion Service (ELIS). As well as learning all about 4-stroke engines! I also managed to take this picture (above) of one of the ELIS current projects.

Every young person involved with the service has been decorating the (life size) cow based on a remembrance rich task theme – a really interesting and powerful piece of work that I really didn’t expect to see as I walked into the classroom. I just has to take a picture!

This afternoon we had the local authority inspection team in where we were asked to present evidence on cluster working. In particular we spoke about our Guitar Hero Transition Project, Custer Leadership Programme and Internet Safety Initiative.

This evening I was out at Knox Academy heading up the second of three Internet Safety and Responsible Use Talks to Parents. We had some great questions at the end of the session! I have also decided to post the majority of my slides (I’ll get round to this later in the week).

Other wise a fairly quiet day!