TED Talk: “Why play is vital – no matter your age” presented by Dr Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play in New York.

Dr Brown’s research indicates that there is a strong correlation between success and playful activity. Play is an altered state, and it’s this state that allows us to explore the possible.

Play changes or overrides:

•       Nature
•       Behaviour
•       Outcomes

Types of play as identified by Dr Brown:

Body play – spontaneous desire to escape gravity – playing for play’s sake – no purpose but the joy of play

Object play – play is practical and need curiosity and exploration with our hands to help solve problems

Social play – if you want to belong

Rough and tumble play – learning medium for all, be chaotic and develop emotional regulation

Spectator play

Ritual play

Imaginative play — Internal narrative story

Solo play

Our own play history is unique and personal, and can be a transforming force.

Importance of play to creative thinking leading from Mihaley Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of

FLOW = fully immersed in what they are doing

= energised focus

= full involvement

= success in the process

What has this to do with learning and learning using games?

It reaffirms the “permission to play” idea I was interested in exploring by adding to this idea in these ways:

•       Play is a biological human need.
•       Play releases the passion within us.
•       Play enables humans to form trusting relationships.
•       Play enables humans to safely explore, to be curious, to connect, and to learn.
•       Play helps contextual memory of events, places, and people.
•       Play empowers humans, and enriches life experiences.
•       Play is a freedom and an opportunity.

Here is the talk – 26 minutes in total.

Image: ‘Play with the Earth‘ 
www.flickr.com/photos/7961121@N04/793987042

21^st Century Pedagogy Conference 2009

The “c” Generation

connect, communicate, collaborate, create

Innovations in ICT Practical Workshop: 

Quality Tools and Quality Teaching in a Quality Learning Environment

Here’s the story plan for today:  welcome to my session on using exciting tools with your students to explore, communicate and create together in your classrooms.

ORIENTATION

Using the NSW Quality Teaching Framework, the three dimensions of pedagogy that underpin the teaching and learning that occurs in classrooms are:

Quality Learning Environment:  refers to pedagogy that creates classrooms where students and teachers work productively in an environment clearly focused on learning. Such pedagogy sets high and explicit expectations and develops positive relationships between teachers and students and among students.

Significance:  refers to pedagogy that helps make learning meaningful and important to students. Such pedagogy draws clear connections with student’s prior knowledge and identities, with contexts outside of the classroom, and with multiple ways of knowing or cultural perspectives.

Intellectual Quality:  refers to pedagogy focuses on producing deep understanding of important concepts, skills,and ideas. Such pedagogy treats knowldege as something that requires active construction and requires students to engage in higher-order thinking and to communicate substantively about what they are learning.

From: NSW Department of Education and Traing, Professional  Learning and Leadership Development.

These are the basics that we are starting and finishing with today – it is the teaching that allows our students to connect, to communicate, to collaborate and to create. It is the quality of the teaching, the quality of the relationships, and the quality of the communication that will make the difference. Technology is the tool that can help us to help our students. It’s the “teach” not the tools that make the difference.

Sort It Out

Diamond

Here is a “lost” blog post that I wrote after taking part in a full day Tim Rylands workshop (last month in Kent, UK)

An outline of the workshop is available on Tim’s site, here, and the combined thoughts and reactions of the day can also be found, here, written by Gail and myself.

The day really sparked my thinking – especially in regards to the framework I am piecing together ­- using computer games creatively to enhance and encourage student writing.

Two ideas that I keep coming back to are giving students

1.    permission to wonder

and

2.    permission to play.

Permission to wonder, to  share your thinking, to brainstorm, to develop creative ideas, silly ideas, the freedom to pose possibilities and run with them.

Too often this step is non-existent in the writing we do in our classrooms, in our haste to get to the written text, the conventions and the punctuation we dismiss this gathering and sorting of ideas – thus depriving our students of a wealth of interesting and exciting possibilities that they can choose to use in their writing.

Giving students the permission to play also supports student language acquisition by making the collection of ideas, words, phrases and sentences

·      physical,

·      active,

·      kineastheic,

·      REAL.

This activity and movement, I‘ve noticed, is vital in my school and class setting, so I was interested to see Tim employing techniques and strategies that got the students moving.

The students gained much from physically linking movement with words – I wonder if this could be connected to “muscle memory” that dancers use????

Thanks Tim for a fantastic day – you are still sparking my thinking and learning – even from this distance. Amazing

Different outlook = different outlook!

I don’t think I want to leave this place

We chatted our way through most of the ills facing education today, planned and plotted how to fix the world and made our way back to what we were all up to and planning for the next year or so.

In The World According to Three Educators by a Fire, this is what we came up with:

Know your goals as you set out.

Take a steady approach, but always with your goals in mind.

Be prepared for serendipitous events, embrace them, use them and learn from them.

Allow students to lead their learning – support, encourage and celebrate learning as it happens.

Need to backward plan at times to enable a more open and exploratory type of learning to take place.

Thanks John, with your knowledge and understanding of students, learning and ICT I know you will continue to make a positive impact on learning in North Lanarkshire schools.

I have been using games in my classroom for nearly two years now and have been constantly surprised at the excitement, success and achievements of my students in this time. My students’ writing has especially been of interest to me and I have thought long and hard about how and why using games elicits such wonderful responses.

I first used PS2 game back stories as models (in 2006) for my students to write their own stories with surprising results. I then moved on to the very different and beautiful Samorost and Samorost 2 games as stimulus (2007) with again, wonderful results.

Using historical stories to build their own games, and write the back stories (also 2007) encouraged the students to come up with interesting and well thought out ideas.

Most recently I used Mario and Sonic at the Olympics as stimulus for writing poetry, which also yielded positive results.

Lots of different games, from internet based to COTS, yet all had great impact on the quality of the writing produced by my students. Why? How?

Well, in a coming together of ideas and professional learning over this time, I’ve read “Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative” by Sir Ken Robinson. So much of what he said made sense to me and led me to this post of thoughts as to why using games with my Primary aged students helps their writing.

The use of the games allows for and promotes creativity!

Robinson refers to creativity as

• doing something
• an action
• applied imagination
• valuable
• public
• original
• a process rather than an event

most of these aspects can be linked to the use of computer games within my class. Perhaps my students are creatively learning – is that it?

I would love to know what you think

Collaborative nature of using games with the whole class on the big screen enables all to participate at whatever level they are comfortable with: amateurs, newbies, competents all have some stake in the game; all have important comments and views to share.

Newbies are seeing things for the first time – they can often share new perspectives that competents and amateurs hadn’t thought about.

Newbies ask questions that competents and amateurs can try to answer – by articulating what they know and teaching others the whys and hows of the game, strategies, language and information within the game can be shared.

Sharing of knowledge, ideas, vocabulary and the “piggy backing” of thoughts helps to grow new ideas and thoughts. Robinson says that we make sense of the world by trying on ideas for size. Shared vocab, shared imagery – this belongs to all of us. Sharing of the language involved provides models and scaffolds that support all learners – ESL, language disordered, struggling and advanced users of English. 

Sometimes the class starts with a common sentence, and everyone builds that sentence into something new. New vocab has meaning; new ways of saying something are shared and modelled. The language belongs to all of us, it gets better and more descriptive the more we use it and mould it to what we want to say.

Striving for more - students push themselves to get better/ be better. They work and think hard together, as a class, to achieve, to make the work stronger, the images clearer and the language richer. Students enjoy the notice, the acknowledgement of their classmates when they come up with a great idea, word, image or phrase.

During the game and the learning sessions, students are working for the common exploration of the game, the theme, the topic; they are working together to explore and imagine. There are no grades, no external reinforcement, just a sense of accomplishment and pride in what they can do. Pushing past what they thought was their best, to speaking, writing or thinking something that is new, improved and satisfying.

A community. My students are not isolated - it’s not them and a blank page – everyone starts together through talking and suggesting. The game provides a shared beginning with lots of “jumping off” points to get them started and on their way.

The oral aspect is vitally important for all students. Trying out ideas, and how they sound in English, and how they might best be written is hard for my ESL students- many of whom don’t yet have a strong idea of exactly how English should sound.

Acceptance of their ideas, providing alternative ways of saying the same thing, playing around with the language in a supportive way builds up the sense of community – everyone has something to offer.

Drama is a fantastic way to tease out new ideas and concepts especially when students are struggling with finding the English words for what they are seeing. Even advanced English speakers are able to develop their vocabulary through dramatic representation of what they are seeing and doing on the screen, in the game.

Students are motivated to try new ideas, new imagery, new ways of approaching writing in a supportive, yet exciting environment. My students are in a familiar domain (computer games) and can relax into the rigorous school domain where they are expected to write (in English) about unfamiliar topics, events and experiences. Their motivation seems to run deeper than simply playing computer games in school. They are being asked to do more than just play the game – they are being asked to think, to respond, to create, to move past the actual game in front of them, to record and deliver their ideas in new and interesting language.

Safe risks where students are encouraged to take risks and realize that to fail (some ideas they have will be better than others) is an important part of learning. Sometimes the flow of ideas and talking is so fast that it’s hard to get what you want down, but in this environment my students can see that their writing is not permanent – they can change it, add to it, re-arrange it, and if they really don’t like it cross it out or leave it and move on. Robinson beleives that creativity involves a dynamic interplay between generating ideas and making judgements about them. We get more ideas, and better ideas through taking these safe risks in a supportive atmosphere.

How different this is from the prolonged agony of no ideas, an empty white page and 20 minutes to write something, anything, at all. When all there was time for was to write down the first thing that came into your head, and it stayed there on the page mocking you (but it really didn’t matter because you didn’t need to read it again anyway. The teacher was the only one who read your work!).

The excitement and noise of ideas bursting forth, of being re-written and re-worked, of being tried out and accepted or laughed at and rejected, only to be picked up again later and turned into something useful. Or the quiet of pencils scratching workbooks, students mumbling sentences under their breath and a sigh of success as their writing works out and they finish off with a flourish and a grin J

I don’t know ………, I’m scratching for answers or insights into why gaming offers such impetus to my students. Is it the creative aspects of the tasks that appeal and resonate with the students? I do know that using computer games has impacted strongly and positively on my classroom over the last two years. Hopefully I’ll find out more (answers or questions – I’m not sure) when in Scotland and England early next year!

Image: ‘The Questions Crap‘
www.flickr.com/photos/84959877@N00/152579107

Thank you to a wonderful group of ESL (English as a Second Language) educators who I worked with today. Your interest, questions and positive outlook as you worked towards understanding blogs and how they can be used to enhance learning in classrooms was appreciated and motivating. There was so much I hoped to share with you – many different tools and applications that all have outstanding possibilities for use by you and your students in your classrooms.

Technology as a tool – as a process

Liam mentioned that in deciding on using various technology applications in a classroom, decisions must be made about the quality and the effectiveness of the tool.

As educators, it is our job to decide which tool or application will add the value to a learning activity. Using technology with classes is not a competition to use as many applications as possible, or to use an application just so you can say that you are using it.

We have to keep the learning outcomes in mind, and if a technological tool can add to a students’ understanding, or help them create understandings then there is a place for it in our classrooms.

Starting out

The web can be an overwhelming place for “newbies” (or newcomers). But if you start slowly and spend some RFF time looking at what others are doing, you will be able to quickly gather an idea of the huge amount of wonderful things that other teachers are doing in their classrooms and with their students.

Checking out the blogrolls on blogs is a great way to open up the “blogosphere” and expand your horizons. Each class links out to other classes at the same school, at schools in other parts of the country, and often across the globe.

You will find links to educational sites that you can use, museums to “visit”, on-line news, resources that can be shared, on-line conferences to listen to, and even professional development opportunities through videos and discussions.

Don’t forget to read the comments after each post to see what others are thinking. You might feel comfortable commenting and adding your thoughts to discussions.

Even if you can’t see yourself setting up a blog just yet, I am sure that you will find the time spent “lurking” on blogs will add to your classroom repertoire of teaching/learning activities and strategies.

Ning

I promised to come back to Ning, didn’t I?!?

A Ning is a social networking application where a group of people who share a common interest in a topic can set up a group on the internet. If you want to be part of that group you can join the Ning and you will be given a home page and access to all sorts of discussions, forums and opportunities to share ideas or ask for help.

Each person in the Ning has their own home page and you contact people through their page. You can leave messages, share photos, watch videos and participate in shared activities or meetings. How much you participate is up to you.

The two large badges on the right of this post are both Ning groups that I belong to. Click on either and have a look. Make sure you find you way to the Main Page to see what is happening within the group.

Projects

Another way to get started is by becoming part of an online project. The beauty of many projects is that someone else is doing the organising and will be able to answer your questions and concerns. You will find that there are people with differing degrees of expertise participating, and that you will be supported and encouraged along the way.

If you find for some reason that the support is not there – you can unengage and move on to something different and better suited to you and your class.

The Department (in NSW) runs Book Raps for all stages over the year, and these raps are beginning to use blogs and wikis to share student work and discussions. A great way to get involved!

Check out the “TESOL SEMINAR PAGE” at the top of this blog for links to other project places.

I will post further information that might add to some of the discussions we had today in another post soon. If you need greater elaboration on anything, please leave a comment here (just click on comments, fill in the required boxes, and hit submit) and I will endeavour to help you out where I can.

Thanks for an exciting morning,

Kim

Image: ‘Bill Gates‘
www.flickr.com/photos/12426416@N00/134672066

Image: ‘Steve Jobs‘
www.flickr.com/photos/12426416@N00/134672123

I wanted to improve the commenting being undertaken by my students. 

We started our discussions by looking at lots of comments on many styles and types of blogs. Students classified them into 3 star, 2 star, and 1 star comments. 

We cut and pasted some comments onto one page and discussed these comments further, trying to find examples of what good comments were. 

Next, students tried to articulate the aspects of comments that made them worthwhile and meaningful to them as recipients. What did they, themselves, feel was useful in a comment? 

We looked at some sentence starters we had up in the room, and why they were good.We looked at open-ended question starters that we use in our Reading Circles and discussed how they were useful. 

We had a chart in our room that we had made earlier in the year that had our class requirements for commenting (full sentences, grammar, punctuation, positive, constructive). 

 We discussed this and realized that we had to add other criteria as well. We came up with a number of areas that were missing from our original chart: 

• Links – to our own life and experiences         
• Responding –  to what the blogger is saying/ thinking/ asking           
• Conversation – between the blogger and you, asking questions for clarification, for more info 

We found it really hard work:  

• to respond thoughtfully to what the blogger was saying, and to respond to their message.           
• to articulate what was required in a great comment 

But we all have a clear definition of what is required now

PS: we practiced our commenting on our blogging friends blogs, and this is what Mr Pearce from Geelong in
Victoria had to say recently 

I thought I would use De Bono’s Thinking Hats to organise my thinking and reflecting on using Samorost as an aid to teaching Narrative with my Year 4, 5 and 6 students.

     White hat:    Just the facts…..

• Curriculum Link: narrative writing in English
• Class had already discussed
  • structure
  • purpose
  • problem/complication
  • characters
  • language of narratives
• First experience with game = played the game together as a class and wrote down our first impressions of the game.
• Talked about Intro scene  (45 minute session) –
  • Discussed purpose of this scene and linked it to a narrative
  • Students shared words and phrases that could describe the little planet. Tried to set the atmosphere of the story – calm, peaceful, mysterious
  • Played around with interesting language, shared vocab, wrote sentences using shared vocab (kids scribbled in notebooks), and rearranged these sentences to see what would happen (were they better, worse, more/less effective?)
• Played Samorost 2
• Collaboratively brainstormed (in three’s) words to make a “Feelings” matrix of words and phrases to use that would show rather than tell  how a character is feeling or the mood in a scene.
• Discussed similes, metaphors and imagery as ways of adding to descriptions. Found examples in literature that used similes, metaphors and imagery. (We collect great sentences or phrases, type them up and put them on the wall for language/literature activities)
• Explored the Anteater scene (1 hour session) –
  • Imagined what it would look, feel, sound like in the metal ball that descended into the anteater scene of Samorost 1. Closed our eyes and imagined.
  • Thought of ways that Sammi would move that would indicate how he was feeling. Actually acted out ways he might exit the ball and how they would show how he was feeling.
  • Tried to “step back” from the scene and look at the environment to identify any images that we could use.
  • The kids were writing down any interesting ideas, phrases, words, sentences that they came up with as we went along
  • Time for writing throughout the session – jotting as well as constructing
  • Sharing each student’s “best bits”

       Red Hat:  Feelings and emotions …..

      Black hat: Negatives and cautions ….

  Yellow Hat: Positives and optimism …..

   Green Hat: Creative ideas and alternatives …..

  Blue Hat: Thinking about the thinking ….