Consolarium

A new case study has just been published on the LTS Consolarium site. Looking at the use of the Myst game in schools in Aberdeenshire in Scotland it documents how the project began, how Tim Rylands helped with CPD and the impact on learning it has had in one school in particular. Have a look to see how paired writing tasks were initiated and how it has motivated reluctant writers to write

We’d love to hear from anyone else who is using this game so that they can tell us what their experience was.

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.