Thunder

Here is Ewan blogging in Derbyshire:

I continue to be amazed by the potential Second Life has for learning, I have just watched the video on this blog post and was completely blown away. Clck below to see a low res version, or follow the link above for a high quality version.

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I have recently been given approval and funding to set up a private island in Second Life, the purpose of he island will be to support the delivery of the new Diplomas in Shropshire schools.  The island will need to be accessed by students aged 14 - 19 and also their teachers. So now I am after some help and advice, any generic help would be most welcome, either in a comment or email steve[at]it4L.org .  I have a couple of key questions at the moment:

1. Should I set the island up on Teen Grid or Second Life, from reading the second life website, I think it would be best put on the Teen Grid and then getting the teachers access to the island.
2. Do all teachers have to get clearance through Ascertain, or can their LA clearance be used?

I would be keen to hear from anyone using Second Life with high school students in the UK, at present I only know of Digital Katie, who I heard speak about her use of Second Life at TeachMeet 06.

Last week while I was in Staffordshire I was chatting to a couple of the delegates about gaming, as you do on a game design course. Tim from Ounsdale School mentioned that he had been playing on ‘Frets on Fire‘, this is an open source (FREE) version of Guitar Hero for the pc or mac. I have since downloaded it, it is very addictive and great fun, I would recommend it to everyone. I have passed the details on to Keith the Shropshire music advisor and we will see what he makes of it.

I have spent today in Staffordshire working with eight ICT teachers from across the county. The Staffordshire ICT consultant has accessed some funding for a study support project, the aim of the project is to participate in a Gaming Competition (details here). I was asked to deliver software training on Game Maker, the software to be used for the project. The project will conclude on the 4th December with the students coming to the training centre to present their games to the other students.

I have set up a blog that will be used to share ideas and work in progress throughout the project, the teachers have posted their initial plans for the project already. What was interesting is that the teachers were discussing how they will be using Game Maker in other contexts outside of the project, replacing Flowol with Game Maker was high on the agenda, iMedia was mentioned by several teachers, and using it from year 7 right up into the sixth form.

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.

In Shropshire YouTube is blocked, but there are lots of really useful videos hiding away.  The geography advisor asked if there was anyway he could show a video from YouTube on a course, after a bit of searching and playing around I found vixy.net.  All he now needs to do is while at home locate the video he wants to use, paste the url into vixy, choose the format he would like the video in and then wait a couple of minutes and download the file to his pc.  Lots of output file formats are available, avi, mov, mp4, 3gp and mp3.

The video he was after was Ultra Records: “Proper Education” - a very cool video.

Last night I read with sadness that BBC Jam is being suspended as of 20th March. This is a real shame as these innovative, high quality resources are available freely to teachers, students and parents. One of the great things about Jam is that it is aimed at the learner not the teacher, but could easily be incorporated into teacher activities. As a student you could use these resources to support the learning you were doing at school.

Update: Check out Ewan’s post

As some of you may be aware I am in ’sunny’ Torquay at the NAACE conference, yesterday I delivered by session on web2.0 in the classroom (you can find most of the sites referred to here).

It has been great to have so much positive feedback and a little constructive negative feedback. This has left me thinking about how to improve and where I believe we should start to go next. What I believe is that it is good to see the practical uses of web2.0 in the classroom whether they be the best use or not, from the primary school blog to the geography tectonics podcast, my use of del.icio.us to the gallery of student work. Where I believe I need to take this next is to start to look in more detail about the effects on teaching and learning from using these technologies, to me it is obvious but that is not the case for everyone.

I think in Shropshire we could be at a tipping point, we have spent the last 18 months or so piloting and developing our use of these technologies but can we start to exploit them even further, using blogs to support boys writing, podcasts to support speaking and listening, del.icio.us to support research etc

I am keen to hear other peoples opinions and set up some collaborations to develop materials to support the use of these technologies in the classroom. Has anyone already developed teaching units, that don’t necessarily teach the technologies but exploit their use.

This morning I was in Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth, Shropshire working with a group of MFL students in year 9.

8 of the students were studying Spanish and the rest of the group were French students. The students studying Spanish were new to the topic so they produced a Spanish Alphabet podcast and an interview with a famous person/celebrity. The students studying French had been working on health etc in their recent lessons so they produced podcasts based around healthy eating, lifestyles etc.

Prior to the session the students had produced their scripts, that they later copied into the lyrics tab (within itunes), this meant that we were able to get straight on with recording their vocals and adding in sounds, then later in the morning appropriate images. It was the first time the majority of the students had used an Apple Mac but had no problems using Garageband. Flickr was used to find copyright free images for use within their podcasts.

As with all these podcasting days I had a great time and the students all seemed to enjoy what they were doing. The deputy head teacher is now thinking about what next, producing podcasts with year 11 students for revision and purchasing a set of MacBook’s for the school. The MFL teachers that worked with me throughout the morning were really impressed by the language questions the students were asking and their motivation throughout, they didn’t stop and go for break

Here is one example (m4a, mp3) the rest can be downloaded and listened/viewed here.