Consolarium

The Consolarium’s approach to the use of games is somewhat exemplified by the Nintendogs project we carried out last year. Nintendogs is a game that was made for commercial sale and one that is very much for entertainment. Look a little closer though and you can see how powerful this game/learning environment is and with a little bit of imagination and a big bit of belief that it is appropriate to use this you can do tremendous things with it.

I met a probationer teacher during my time at Fraserburgh PS called Jo Barcus Buchan. A P.2 teacher, Jo recently graduated and was lucky enough to get a chance to try out the Nintendogs project with her class. She replicated a lot of what has been established as a good practice with this resource. Have a look at some of the photos .

She has though extended the learning that may be achieved through the context of Nintendogs by moving into the world of art & design and to engage her P.2 children in dialogue about artists craft and what paintings make you feel or think. She introduced four paintings about dogs to her class and these were observed and discussed. These observation’s and discussions were then taken into the children’s own work where they had to think about what choices they were making in the creation of their pieces of art based on what they had seen.

Have a listen to the latest Consolarium podcast to hear our more detailed discussion, some perspective from the children and the view of the Headteacher.

Thanks go out to all Fraserburgh South Park PS for allowing us to come and see and record the excellent work that is happening up there. Well done to you all.

Last week I took the Consolarium to a CPD event in Dundee. I was invited along by the ICT Staff Tutor team in Dundee to contribute to an in-service day that was to take place in a city centre hotel. The idea was that it would act as a mini-exhibition similar to the one that LTS has at The Scottish Learning Festival. Organisations and companies whose business is focused on ICT in teaching and learning were invited along to raise awareness about how their products could impact on teaching and learning.

The staff tutors were also working in conjunction with the Learning Together in Dundee (LTiD) team. LTiD is Dundee City Council’s main driver in relation to embedding formative assessment strategies in classroom practice and this was designed to highlight ways in which ICT and LTiD could work in tandem. Have a look at how one school in the city is implementing this strategy.

The Consolarium stand was given a prime spot with a ridiculously large projection screen, however, it made the games look even more spectacular. I had taken along the Xbox 360, the Wii and the PS2 as well as Nintendo DS and Sony PSP machines. I also took along a variety of games that would exemplify a wide range of curricular applications of games based learning.

To say the stand was busy is an understatement. The teachers who came along (and it was estimated that almost 900 were in attendance over the course of the day) were very interested in what games based learning was all about and how it might work in their clasrooms. Many of them had read about our Dr Kawashima project and quite a few had visited the Consolarium’s website. Many of the Wii games proved a hit but Guitar Hero was the most popular of the day. At one point there was chorus of ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ drowning out almost everything else as a large group of teachers let their hair down and lost themselves in the game when two of their colleagues battled out that song. Apologies to the other presenters who were beside me.

I have made a short podcast of the day which can be accessed via my own blog for the time being.

Hopefully this will give a flavour of the day and of how the teachers enjoyed this ‘different’ approach to in-service.

Thanks to all at Dundee for the opportunity to share our work with their teachers and thanks to the teachers who engaged, in such an open-minded and enthusiastic fashion, with the resources and concepts underpinning our work .