Thunder

Futurelab, in partnership with Promethean, invites you to a debate

9:30-1:30, Thursday 24 May 2007
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 12 Great George Street, London

The debate will be chaired by Futurelab, and brings together expert speakers to present provocative arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ the use of interactive whiteboards in the classroom. The audience, made up from experts and creative thinkers from the fields of education, technology and curriculum policy, will listen and respond to the arguments, and take part in wider discussions and debate.

Futurelab has compiled a review of key research findings in this area, which will be made available to attendees. Research findings will be considered and critiqued, and the pedagogical implications of the use of interactive whiteboards will be discussed in the context of current policy and educational initiatives.

There will also be an opportunity for participants to put forward their suggestions and visions of the potential future directions and technological developments that relate to interactive technologies in the classroom.

We hope you will be able to join us for what we’re sure will be a lively, informative and thought-provoking event that will offer you a great opportunity to meet informed people and thinkers from a range of different fields.

Please let us know whether you will be able to attend and forward this invite on to colleagues who may also be interested in attending. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

Best wishes,

Dr Tim Rudd
Senior Researcher
Futurelab

RSVP: karen.thompson@futurelab.org.uk by 27 April.

Both Futurelab and Promethean are passionate about transforming the way people learn, tapping into the huge potential offered by digital technologies to develop innovative learning resources and practices. For further information, go to www.futurelab.org.uk and www.prometheanworld.com.

Yesterday I attended Becta’s ‘Enhancing learning; virtual worlds, simulations and game based learning’ seminar. It was an excellent even, a shame only 3 Local Authorities sent representation, the majority of the audience were game/e-learning companies and university representatives.

Dave Hassell kick started the day, setting the scene etc. The first question posed was ‘what is a game?’, there are a variety of answers for that and examples are given in his presentation. What I think was important is that it doesn’t really matter what your answer is, ie what the product is, what is important is the outcome achieved by the ‘game’. He stated that over £1 billion has been spent in the education sector over that last 5 years on content, how much value for money have we had from this investment? We need a strategic approach to this spend and the sector should investigate what it wants the content to achieve first.

When students are playing games we should think about the following:

If ‘games’ are beneficial then how do we get the workforce to adopt them? What interventions are needed to achieve this? Should we do this or should we leave computer games for students use at home?

Presentations can be downloaded from the Becta website.