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Crazy Talking in Stirling

Derek RobertsonSeptember 27th, 2007

Apologies to all at Stirling Council for the lateness of this post regarding your presentation at SLF ‘07 but I have been waiting to see if I could source some photographs of your session. As yet I haven’t but I’m still looking!

One of the very early adopters of games based initiatives with the Consolarium was Stirling Council. The team came to visit the centre in early 2007 and as a result of the day we had a number of possible projects were discussed. One particular application caught the eye of the team that day and they felt that it had the capacity to really engage reluctant writers so that they would want to write. The application in question is called Crazy Talk and it really has great potential as a learning tool. Their presentation was yet again bursting with life, character and good practice. Margaret Cassidy and Joe Shaw from the Quality Development Team gave the presentation with help of some children from a local school that had been using the software.

The children talked about how they had used Crazy Talk in different topics of study. One such topic was a collaborative investigation of the story and history of the ill-fated Titanic. The kids created their own drawings of people that were on the Titanic and then they brought them to life in Crazy Talk. Have a look at one of these characters created by the kids:

A fiull case study of what has happened with this application and how it has impacted on the teaching and learning will appear on the Consolarium’s sharing practice very soon.

In the meantime have a look at how you use Crazy Talk:

A number of other local authorities are using this application so we look forward to finding out more about how it is making an impact in those schools too.

Categories: Scotlearnfest07, Stirling Council, animation, writing

5 Responses to “Crazy Talking in Stirling”

  1. Margaret September 29th, 2007 at 10:00 am
    Derek, the photos we have are from the back of the room and not very clear. Crazy Talk speaks for itself so you don’t really need photos of the presenters.

  2. Ewan McIntosh September 30th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
    The great thing about this, of course, is that the result is so easily shareable. When so many good things our kids produce are locked up in DVDs, put on closed classroom walls and then dumped at the end of the school year, I think it’s superb that we can have this live on for, well, much longer, and maybe forever.

  3. Bill Esdale December 6th, 2007 at 11:24 am
    Derek,
    I would just like to say how much I enjoyed the presentation that the children gave during the SLF ‘07. It was brilliant and they all seemed to enjoy using CT4. I also heard from Margaret Cassidy that the presentation that she gave in the US went down very well also. Very well done to all the students and staff.

    Bill

  4. Modern Languages Blog » Communicate.08 - Crazy Talking for MFL March 8th, 2008 at 10:58 am
    [...] will show how it’s being used in Modern Languages. While we wait to catch up with her, take a look at some of the work that’s already been done in Stirling with Crazy [...]

  5. Consolarium » Crazy Talking and exploring Art & Design March 25th, 2008 at 12:52 am
    [...] I managed to get some great stuff going on, particularly in Stirling Council where they used it to great effect with a collaborative writing project that was showcased at a seminar at SLF 07. [...]

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