Highland Fun and Games [based learning]

Today I had my hair curled but not at the hairdresser, I was also told that I definitely had green eyes, my nose was not a triangle and even though I was big I could be small today just like everyone else but everyone else didn't need to be small because they could choose to be big but today I was going to be small.

To put this all into context for you I had set off this morning to visit a nursery class in an Aberdeenshire primary school that has been using Wii Music as a learning context.  After a rather typical journey I arrived just in time to help create a mii for me.  Telling the children that I had not made a mii before led them to give me a wonderful tutorial on how to create your own character on the Wii.  Did you know that your mii can look like anything you want it to?

"It doesn't need to look like you as long as you can find it in the mii plaza." (C, age 4)

Behind the scenes the planning and organisation that has gone into this project has undoubtedly aided it's success yet there has been the flexibility for the children to lead their own adventure.  The game may have been Wii Music but the learning that has evolved has focused on collaborative working, turn taking, numeracy development and environmental language exposure.  The areas of the game that an older child may often choose to skip through proved to be some of the more popular areas for the nursery children with their favourite activities including watching the video replay of their jam session and creating album covers for their dvd within the game.  (It should be noted that the curricular links given are not limited and there are many further links that are relevant)  The jam sessions themselves provided the perfect opportunity for immersive role play during which the children enjoyed being rock stars choosing their preferred instruments, most popular were the electric guitar and the drum kit.  The children became experienced at identifying the various instruments used within the game and learned musical terminology and vocabulary.  The teacher noted that the development of rhythm and tempo were areas that did not progress well despite this being the obvious expectation that one may associate with such an activity.

Something that the nursery I visited demonstrated very well was the home school partnership.  Parents were informed throughout the project and provided feedback (via forms) sharing their experience of their child's progress.  The staff created visually stimulating displays consisting of photographs and key words relating to the learning experience and information was added to the children's 'learning stories' books which provide a snapshot of some of the experiences each child has encountered while in the nursery setting.  The children also completed feedback sheets using the traffic light system (which is used throughout the school) and comments scribed by staff.  All but two of the children chose green to represent their enjoyment of the project where green symbolised "really enjoyed it", the two other children chose orange, representing "it was ok".  In terms of class feedback this in itself is pretty impressive and demonstrates the enjoyment provided by the use of the game.

The use of the Wii was limited within the nursery but not during a session.  The area containing the wii became another context area for the children and in this way it was not limited but rather the days when the wii was used became the control method.  I believe that this kept the interest in the game as the children were excited when the wii was out rather than it becoming just another area.

There was also time for whole nursery activities when everyone would gather together as a group to watch aspects of the game and discuss progress.  All children created their own mii and were able to identify their character from the mii parade.  This was extended by the children drawing a black line representation of their mii.  The level of detail in each drawing from children who were both 3 and 4 demonstrated a clear stimulation and motivation for the task.  The awareness of self involved in creating the mii characters is an area that I had not considered when introducing the Nintendo Wii into a class or nursery setting yet it is also an area that holds a great deal of potential for first time use.

Prior to my visit I had the opportunity of accessing the glow group for the school which included the planning materials and evaluations.  I am particularly grateful to everyone that helped me in arranging this visit and to the school and staff for letting me visit.  The idea of learning being multi-dimensional (Muschamp, 2010)was the motivating factor for why I arranged the visit.  The information available through glow could only provide me with so much information but the experience of witnessing the children engaging with the technology provided an insight than cannot be described on paper.  I have learned a lot personally about the practicalities of GBL in a real context in an early years setting and along the way I have also learned a lot about the potential of glow.  Next steps for me include my own wii based project which begins next week...

Sighs

Ahhhhhhhhh time to slow down for a day or two.

What a busy week it has been.  On Monday night the presentations of the INSITE project were scheduled to run from 6:30pm EST and Rebecca and Myself participated via the 99chats tools that we had been investigating during the project.  I still have doubts over the possibility of using the tool anywhere near children but can see the possibilities for higher education and business.  I think the element that was most exposed during the course of the project is the idea that using a tool because it is there is pointless.  Sharon always tells us to only use something if it is beneficial to learning and appropriate for the intentions.  I struggle to justify any form of appropriateness in the 99chats tool due to a severe lack of moderation which leaves children exposed to highly inappropriate content in the form of abusive, derogatory and unsuitable language use.

This is a link to the wiki area where the project work has been posted.  The lessons that I planned were the secondary lessons for the Great Debate and Our Future Teachers.  The lessons can be found on the wiki page.  I am not experienced in secondary education and I have never planned with American Standards so if you get a chance to look at the lessons please let me know what you think.

On Tuesday night I attended my first ever Teachmeet.  For those of you who do not know what a teachmeet is I think this clip explains it far better than I ever could:



As I mentioned in an earlier post I did not just attend the TM I presented at it.  What I didn't share previously was what I was presenting on.  I had decided to talk about PrimaryPad and googledocs and their potential for classroom use.  Being slightly insane when I signed up I also decided to do a second presentation on global Classrooms although I limited this to the Voices of the World project.

The Teachmeet was streamed live and a copy of the live streaming section containing my presentations can be found here.  The other two sections of the evening can be found here and here.

On Wednesday I attended a conference at the university that focused on professional practice and research.  Not only was this extremely informative, I also helped with two presentations during the day.

Now with all this happening you would never know that I had two assignments that were feeling rather lonely and neglected sitting in my dropbox [clicking this link and creating an account will give us both extra storage space] needing nurture and lots of development (in terms of word count they fell around 85% short!)  By 12 midday, much to my shock, I had finished them both and before I could change my mind and edit some more I headed off to Dundee and submitted them both.

What I have learned this week is that I do not know the meaning of pacing myself but I do know that every now and again a little madness won't harm me as everything is good in moderation.

(Maybe some day I will share the story of my giggling with you all on the ponderings blog)

For now I NEED SLEEP

buenas noches

our FINISHED animation

This is a sample animation that we made using DigiBlue cameras and a lot of patience. 



For more on our animation task see this earlier post.

Voices of the World

After much persuasion I have managed to get Sharon to agree to let me lead the Voices of the World project for the foreseeable future.

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

Voices of the World is a project that was set up to connect children in classrooms worldwide.  The use of voice to do this posed two benefits

• children will be able to relate better to other children when hearing the spoken word rather than the written word; this makes the other schools seem more real
• children will be able to develop an appreciation for the different languages, dialects and accents around the world (Tonner, 2007)

The community has been established for almost three years at present and many of the first members are still active participants.  It is the responsibility of the leader to create monthly tasks which are posted for completion by members with their classes.  At the end of the month tasks are all submitted to the leader for posting on the wikispace.

I have been in the role of leader for almost a month now and I am enjoying it greatly.  Everyone that I have spoken with involved in the project is very enthusiastic and I hope to try out some new additional elements within the community.  To achieve this I have created an additional area with an introductory task related to the monthly task.  We have 6 classes creating 2 acrostic poems collaboratively.  All 6 classes are contributing to both poems and the poems are going to be tri-lingual.

Following the recent announcement that ning will no longer operate a free service we are investigating alternative hosting for the teachers' area of the project.

I will be posting more on my experiences with Voices of the World so keep a watch for further updates.

Teach Meet Student Edition

There is nothing like a sneaky blog entry when I should be writing an assignment so here goes...




Tomorrow (20/04/2010) I am attending a TeachMeet in Aberdeen.  This will be my first time attending a TeachMeet and just for the fun of it I have signed up to present while I am there.  As the old adage goes "in for a penny, in for a pound".


A TeachMeet is an informal gathering of educationalists and the purpose is to share experiences, ideas and discover new things or in the words of the descriptor:


 "This is an informal gathering of those who want to share cool ideas they have tried in their classrooms."


The Presentations last either 2 minutes or 7 minutes and you have an allocation of 1 minute to set up.  This being the case (and the fact that once I start talking I often forget to pause for breath or indeed stop at all) I signed up to do one of each; a 7 minute presentation and a 2 minute nano presentation.  I am pretty well decided on what I am going to talk about but as I am not 100% sure I'm not going to tell you right now.  (Although it wouldn't take a great deal of detective work to find out)


and we get back to the issue of assignment procrastination...  Why is nearly anything else just so interesting when distractions should be most unwelcome?

World of Wikis - WoW

Prequel: If you are reading this without knowledge of our project this is a brief introduction to what we were aiming for.  For our ICT elective we had to create a digital movie and a resource to accomany this.  As a group we chose the theme of Dundee as a city study then narrowed this to focus on school trip venues in and around Dundee.  We created three short digital movies and these were incorporated into a wikispace designed around our theme.  Our wikispace was designed for teacher use and there are elements that may be used with pupils.  

The presentations are over and what a relief.  There was a time when I didn't think we would get there but at the last gasp it all came together and the remaining members of our group all completed our sections.  I say remaining as we seem to have lost a member along the way but that is not my story to tell.  We started as a group of four and ended as a group of three and that is all the detail you are going to get.

We are definitely a group now and even though there have been issues a plenty we did achieve a great deal and I think this was evident during the presentations.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing and most commonly linked to reflecting on improvements that could have been made over the course of a project.  With hindsight it is probably even clearer that we took on a big project, bigger than was necessary, and with a bigger project put more pressure on ourselves in terms of workload.  We also had a few minor trust issues with completion times for allocated jobs and when working with student teachers neurotic can sometimes be a good adjective to use, although controlling is a milder description.  It was often difficult to hold back and not take over the entire project, see earlier entry on this.  Some people just work better when deadlines are forming imposing shadows over them and some people hyperventilate when those same shadows begin to highlight the work that is still to be completed.  While these reactions can cause friction it is important to take a step back and learn from each other.  To understand is sometimes more important than the actual task (in this case task completion was essential), if we can develop both our understanding of how we work and learn and how others work and learn and relate the similarities and differences then the learning itself is more meaningful.

To transfer this to a classroom you may link to the concept that skill development can be more productive than knowledge development.  In my opinion they go hand in hand: with the development of skills you will build upon knowledge, as you build upon knowledge you practice skills.  The idea of "acting as a sensitive guide" is highlighted by Myhill and Warren (2005); through having the experience of reaching a solution as a learner when working in groups you are provided with an ideal opportunity, as a student teacher, to experience when intervention is needed and when the teacher needs to encourage pupils to reach a solution with limited intervention.  Being able to hold back rather than step in as a teacher is an essential skill for us to foster.

What we did manage well was developing links with other agencies through the visitors attractions that we filmed at.  These were Sensation, RRS Discovery and the Botanic Garden, all Dundee.  The people that we met and worked with were incredible in helping us with anything we needed and Sensation, in particular, set up exhibits for us to film at.  We cannot thank everyone enough for their assistance.  To be able to begin to build links that will be beneficial in both our teaching practice and our future classroom practice is invaluable.  There are many resources available but having a guide in choosing the most appropriate, from a specialist in a particular field, cannot be measured.

The rollercoaster of production has also provided a real sense of ownership of the project for us as group members and with this in mind we have a pride in our finished work.  That is not to say it is perfect, I still develop a twitch when thinking of the audio, but it is ours.

If you would like to have a look at our finished work, including the videos I am attaching a link

HERE

We hope you enjoying viewing our work.