Consolarium

Ollie Bray, depute headteacher of Musselbrough Grammar School, East Lothian, took first place in the Innovation in Community section for his presentation of ‘Thinking out of the XBOX’ at the Innovative Teachers Forum 2009 in Vienna. He is currently on secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland as a National Adviser for Emerging Technologies in Learning.

Inspired by a project initiated by Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium initiative he organised an extension of this innovative idea and organised a transition project for the associate Primary schools of Musselburgh GS using Guitar Hero. This approach proved to be a great success and the Guitar Hero transition project will now be rolled out across East Lothian schools within weeks. Schools all over Scotland are already using this resource. Schools in England and even as far afield as Hong Kong and Australia, are interested in the project. Mr Bray devised a three-step process of ‘learning, social interaction and reflection and moving on’ as children change.

The Scotsman article: Teacher who inspires pupils with rock ‘n’ roll wins top award

Merlin John’s blog: Ollie Bray takes gaming to international stage

Ollie Bray’s blog: Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum

..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.