Consolarium

New to the post!

A quick introduction; I am Brian McLaren and I am the new Consolarium Development Officer.  Three weeks into the job and my head is beginning to stop spinning.  I am amazed by the energy and application of everyone I have met so far and I am really looking forward to supporting and sharing the good practice going on in schools.

I am currently looking into the potential of a number of games for classroom use including “Little Big Planet” for PS3, “Wild Earth African Safari” and “SimAnimals” for Wii. 

If you have any experience of using these games in your class or are keen to do so please feel free to contact me.  I am also keen to hear of your experiences using Games Based Learning in your class and would love to see some pics of your success.

My email is B.McLaren@LTScotland.org.uk

The Sony PSP project in the P.7 class in Campie P.S. in Musselburgh is well under way. The children have all been given their PSPs and are getting in to the habit of using it as part of their everyday learning. I must say that it seemed kind of incongruous to see the PSP sitting alongside some of the children’s pencil cases but the children looked at me quizzically when I suggested this idea to them-“What’s strange about the PSP in class? It’s a great way to learn!” I was quickly informed!

We have provided the children with a game for the PSP called Hot Brain. The idea behind this was to try to create a similar experience as to the one that we created with our Nintendo DS DR.  Dr Kawashima in Dundee, one that presents the children with a series of challenging numeracy, literacy and puzzle games that they can play for the first 15-20 minutes of the school day. The children are keeping a log of their progress in the game on paper (as well as within the game)  and they are all very keen to reach the level of excellence in Hot Brain – reaching the brain temperature of 55 degrees! If you reach this then you have a Hot Brain!

I had a chat with the children about the game and the response was an overwhelmingly positive one. They thought it was ‘brilliant’ to have the PSP in their class and that Hot Brain was a great way to ‘get the day started at school.’ The class teacher, Alicia Macfarlane, said that they although her class have always been well-behaved she has noticed that they are even more settled and focused first thing as they get stuck in to their Hot Brain games.I then observed a lesson that involved the children editing movies that they had shot on their PSPs. We have provided a camera for each PSP and this enables all the children to capture movies for their project work with ease. Campie PS use Macs and has meant that there are some challenges in relation to transference of data/assets from the PSP to the Mac. The PSP records the movie file as an .avi and although it squirts across to the Mac quickly via USB it is taking as bit of time to load up into imovie. However, once the movies were uploaded the children took their video-editing session really well. This kind of challenge will no doubt be presented to us on this pilot but it’s all learning as they say. Mrs Macfarlane also told me how she is beginning to integrate the wireless browser capability of the PSP into the teaching and learning in her class. The children are studying WW2 at present and they managed to access and download images of ration books to help them with a particular aspect of their project. This means that each child is free to browse the web on their own, at their desk with their individual handheld device.A class blog has been established so you can keep up-to-date of what’s happening with the PSPs in class. Great progress so far at Campie P.S and a big well done to Mrs Macfarlane and all the children of P.6/7.