$strParentSiteName
blog

Consolarium

The Consolarium…every school should have one!

Derek RobertsonSeptember 21st, 2007

..so says Stephen Heppell in his Back and Forth article in the Guardian (18/09/07). Stephen came up to visit Dundee a few months back and I took him to see the children that I had worked with on my Nintendo DS Dr. Kawashima project. He was very interested in what had happened in the project and he summarised it this way:

“It will be no surprise to readers that performances got better in some key areas of the curriculum, but new orders of merit also emerged as unexpected performances showed new and unrecognised potential. Being brainy became cool, too, and it has been quite a while since schools students regarded anything related to school technology as cool.”

Full details of the project can be found at the Kawashima Case study within the Consolarium’s sharing practice area.

We delivered a seminar presentation about this project at the Scottish Learning Festival. There was great interest about what happened and added value in terms of the DHT from the school that I worked with talking about how he and the school feels that there has been a longer term affect on the dynamic of the class as a result of the project.

The more I talk about this project the more I am hearing of other teachers talking about using the Nintendo DS in the class. If so what are you doing with it? Let us know.

Categories: Added Value, Dundee City, Nintendo, Numeracy, Scotlearnfest07

2 Responses to “The Consolarium…every school should have one!”

  1. Connected Blog » Getting mobile: Stephen Heppell roundup and videos September 26th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
    [...] Will learning ever be mobile enough? The one thing Stephen has been thumping on about, and quite rightly so, is the importance of making learning smaller, more mobile. Recently writing in The Guardian about his early mobile phone/block of cement experiences, and rediscovering this cumbersome tool, reminds us that the tiny devices now carried by students (often ‘illegitimately’ in their school) are more powerful than the same computers we spend what relatively little money we have for ICT in education (it will always be too little for this blogger). They’re also insanely popular with the kids: they make being brainy cool. If the power really is in their pockets, why do we see rare examples of mobiles being exploited in the classroom, such as those that were so well received at Sharon Tonner’s session on mobile learning at The High School of Dundee? Perhaps we also need to talk more about how we lay the way for this to happen, preparing teachers, parents and students alike with a new set of literacy skills. [...]

  2. sarah derrick September 28th, 2007 at 11:21 am
    Hurrah for Consularium! Developing work in both formal and informal learning contexts about moving image education / 21st Century Literacies at Dundee Contemporary Arts has now led us to be looking at on-line activity and gaming. Via our Community & Education Programme we are collecting current ‘top’ sites used by the under 18s – purely for us to find out what’s out there and we are also offering workshop sessions for parents who may be curious or alarmed…

    We would like to develop a series of eventsfor 2008 and would like to invite Consularium and Derek to partner/participate. Will keep in touch.

Write a comment

Comment form