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Australian Postcards Please!
Sep 1st
We are hoping to connect with lots of different schools right across Australia for our topic work this term.
This will help our children to really understand what life is like today for their peers throughout Australia.
But for an old fashioned pen-pal style idea we welcome your postcards, because after all there is still something special about receiving mail – the physical kind!
If you are an Australian teacher or educator we would love to have you and your class send us a card. The postcard could be about your town, city or state or even a famous landmark you are close to.
We have two classes doing the Australia topic so if you could please send 2 cards one addressed to Mr Barrett’s Class and the other to Mrs Bartholomew’s Class.
John Davies Primary School
Barker Street,
Huthwaite,
Sutton-in-Ashfield,
Nottinghamshire,
England.
NG17 2LH
As we gather your cards we will photograph them and update your location on a Google Map. Don’t forget to add your class blog address if you have one – our Year 5/6 classes will be starting their own soon.
Please let us know if you can help and we look forward to seeing your cards in the post!
__
Pic: Wish You Were Here by H4NUM4N
Seeing Ripples
Mar 21st
When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.
Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
View Berlin in a larger map
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
Superhero Ideas That Didn’t Make It Through the Revolving Doors
Mar 20th
Earlier this year we completed a very successful Superheroes topic in school. However many of the initial ideas I had never made it out of the revolving doors, so to speak.
One of the biggest influences for ideas and content was discovering the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company and the spin off thoughts that occurred. The Superhero Supply store is a real shop in Brooklyn which sells all sorts of hero paraphernalia, from capes to muscles in a tin. Behind a swinging bookcase is of course a secret lair, a children’s writing and tutoring workshop.
The Superhero Supply Company is part of 826 National a non-profit organisation in the US to help support school children with homework and writing. Established by Dave Eggers it now has “stores” across the country with a simple aim:
Our goal is to assist students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to help teachers get their classes excited about writing.
Of course what struck me about the concept and especially the Superhero online store, was the level of meta fiction that could be explored. This topic can easily focus on the comic book fiction but the mundaneness of shopping for a suitable replacement cape struck me as such a great idea to work with.
- Turn your classroom into a store for Superheroes.
- Try and find a mannequin that you could use to show a superhero outfit.
- Use the Pixar film The Incredibles.
- What happens in the everyday life of a Superhero?
- In drama explore everyday routines with a superhero costume on – queuing for a bus, picking up some milk from the shop.
The online store provided me with a rich vein of ideas for writing beyond children’s own fictional heroes.
The persuasive language used to sell the special products on offer would be a great text to unpick. For example on sale at the online store is Item No. 2503 - STANDARD 58″ SUPERHERO CAPE.
For over two centuries, the BSSCo. Standard 58″ Superhero Cape has been the industry standard in fly-wear for professional heroes. Every cape we ship meets all Superhero Alliance and FAA regulation requirements, and is specially designed for maximum flight control and resistance to air burn.
If you’re a working, flying superhero, the Standard 58″ Superhero Cape is a must-have. Because let’s face it. Without one, you’re just some guy who looks like he’s falling.
Available in a variety of colors.
The act of exploring the sophisticated persuasive devices used in the short product descriptions would be an excellent class activity.
- Develop your own online Superhero Supply store.
- Invite children to bring in toys and gadgets that could be rebranded as hero gear.
- Model how to write a similarly persuasive piece for their own gadgets.
- Children could role play the real life store or an order by telephone- Superhero and sales assistant, “I’m looking for something a little darker…”
- Develop a customer newsletter from the store or a flyer.
- What other things might we find in tins? Muscles, gravity – create your own Hero Basics range
- Script a radio or TV commercial as a Superhero endorses the store.
Further to these ideas we looked at how the children could design and make their own superhero costumes. This could be done so that they could wear them and then use them in subsequent drama and fictional work.
On reflection we did think that full size costumes for each child might end up quite a complex operation, so considered three alternatives. (1) To buy lots of dolls that could be dressed in miniature (2) Invite some local fashion design students to help (3) Creating a utility belt may be a design project that would allow children to work individually.
Accompanying these little design and make projects children could provide instruction manuals for the products that are created, such as the functions of the belt or the unique features of their cape.
Of course the stores have real products and their sale raises money for the 826 tutoring programmes and running costs. Each store has a different style as explained on the 826 National web page:
San Francisco’s pirate supply store sells glass eyes and one-of-a-kind peglegs, 826NYC’s Superhero Supply Company offers custom-fit capes, Seattle’s Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company sells all your space commuting appurtenances, 826michigan’s Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair Shop specializes in must-have mechanical conveniences, while 826LA features a time travel store, there’s a secret agent supply store in Chicago, and the Cryptozoology shop in Boston is now open!
Spend any amount of time browsing the products available in the online store and you are bound to be inspired.
It is unfortunate I never got to put some of the ideas I have outlined into action, but I hope that sharing them here may give you the opportunity.
Pic: Jeffrey O. Gustafson
Using Voicethread for Writing Ideas and for Peer Marking
Feb 1st
In the past week or so our literacy work has focused on a short sequence from the comic Spiderman #1. Our Superheroes topic is going well and in this post I explain how we have used Voicethread as a creation tool, a writing scaffold and as a way to do peer marking.
We began with the sequence in the comic where Peter is attending a science fair at a local school and is bitten by spider that has been zapped by one of the radiation machines on show. I wanted the short 5 panel sequence to be the focus of an extended narrative. I liked the tight focus on a few moments and the action and comic imagery would really help us to write some interesting narrative.
To begin with we made some notes about the short sequence as a whole class, mainly key words, things that just jumped out from the images and from the facial expressions of Peter.
The next step was to import the five panels from the comic you can see in the above image into Voicethread. I just used a screen capture tool and created some separate image files for each. The Voicethread was to be a collection of first ideas. At this early stage of the writing process I think Voicethread plays it’s hand superbly.
The children have the opportunity to say their ideas aloud. To articulate, listen back, correct and re-articulate very easily. All of the children in the year group worked on writing and recording ideas for the Bitten! sequence and as you know they are privy to all of the comments from their peers in real time. We used the vocabulary above as a stimulus throughout this early task.
After sharing literally hundreds of narrative ideas for the sequence, the children were put with a writing partner. Often we focus on writing in solitude but I think the support and insight children can get from working together is hugely rewarding. They get to see how someone else might approach the same piece of writing.
I modelled the up-levelling or improvement of some simple starter sentences for each of the panels. We worked together as a class to extend and improve on them using the language already collected. The children used Google Docs for their work and I encouraged children to also have open the Voicethread of ideas that we had created. The 5 panels acted as 5 simple paragraph changes. In this step the children are using Voicethread as a source of ideas and as a writing scaffold. They listened and read back the comments others had left and I think found these really useful in kick-starting their work.
As we were working in Google Docs I dipped into their work as they were busy writing. I have written before about how this is less obtrusive than looking over their shoulder or taking their books off of them. I added a header to the Google Doc and then used CTRL+M to add a named and dated comment. I would back this up by a quick chat with the pair if needed to ensure they would act on my advice and feedback.
The children had of course shared their Document with me and their writing partner. In my Docs home screen I used the star label to show which Docs I had marked and which I hadn’t. You can read some more ideas for marking with Google Docs in this blog post.
As part of the writing process I explained we would be publishing some to the class blog. I wanted the feedback from the blog to be part of the improvement process for the children. I think that if you plan to publish examples of work in this way, and the kids know this before they begin, you are not just bolting it on afterwards. The children know that the blog readership will be their audience.
We were able to publish 80 percent of the work from the class, those that didn’t were just unfinished. The comments that we received were fantastic and greatly encouraging for the children involved. We would revisit these later in the process.
Although the children have a finished piece of work at this point we are only part of the way through the writing process I had planned and this is where we turned back to Voicethread again. (We kept a printed copy of this first draft.) I have often said that the use of PDFs in Voicethread is overlooked. Clearly the use of images and video is very engaging, but adding PDFs is really useful functionality.
I did two things before exporting the children’s work from Google Docs. Firstly I added their names next to the title of the work. I knew from who shared it with me who the owner was, but as a plain PDF it would be missing that. The second thing was to increase the size of the text so that it was clearly visible in Voicethread.
Voicethread allows you to zoom in to text or images, but when you need to use the pen highlighter it zooms out. With a full page PDF the writing can sometimes be too small to see. Ensuring the text size is set as high as possible is really important if you want to take advantage of the pen tool.
Once this was done I exported all of the Docs as PDFs (no need to worry about the file names as you added their names to the text already) and imported these into a new Voicethread. I noticed that some of the pages were jumbled, in other words if a piece of work was over 2 pages these pages were split. Naturally you want them next to each in Voicethread - watch out for that, however it is easy to move pages about from the upload screen.
Saying that, it is hard to see from the thumbnails which belong together – maybe that is something for Voicethread to work on. Either a magnify function on the upload page for each thumbnail or better assurance PDFs will stay in the correct order.
Once the Voicethread was ready to go I asked each pair to record an audio comment of one of them reading out their own work. This is a simple step you can take to allow all of the children in the class to access the different pieces of writing. If they struggled reading it, there was an audio version! We talked to the children about adding comments and feedback and I stuck to a simple 2 stars (things they liked) and 1 wish (something to improve) which we have used before. I encouraged them to use the pen tool to highlight words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that they were referring too and this proved very successful.
Interestingly the process of reading your own work out aloud and recording it made the children realise where they could improve their own work.
The final step was to revisit their original writing and complete the editing process. It is sometimes hard to find time to review work in light of comments but is essential in helping children improve. Those with blog comments on their work were encouraged to look at what was written. Everyone had numerous comments on their own work as part of the Voicethread - they went back to their Google Doc and made alterations and improvements based upon the feedback from me, their peers and the wider audience on the blog.
I went to every single pair and asked them to talk through some of the alterations they had made and guided them to focus on anything they had overlooked.
In short the sequence looked like this:
- Reading the focus sequence
- Gathering initial vocabulary and feedback
- Voicethread of sequence – children add ideas
- Writing begins – using above resources
- Writing is published to the class blog and uploaded to Voicethread
- Voicethread of work – children add feedback
- Edit in light of teacher, blog and peer comments
This was over the course of about a week and half to two weeks. This sort of timescale really allows you the space to establish some quality and immerse you and the class in the piece of work. After all, we were only writing about a very short moment in time.
It may have only been a few fleeting, painful moments for Peter when he was bitten, but we found this extended writing and review process really successful.
Sealife Action Text
Nov 6th
Learning a short piece of text has proven really valuable to many of our Year 5s who find it harder than others to begin their writing.
An action text is a short, simply written, piece that allows us to add actions to represent the words. We would learn the text and the actions as a whole class, inviting the children to suggest memorable actions for the major words. We had lots of fun doing this and even came up with a “link” action (hands clasped together) to show the connectives in the writing, such as “and” and “before”.
I invited the children to create little doodles above the words to help them remember them too. Here are some examples.
During some lessons we worked on taking some of the simple sentences and improving them by adding some more descriptive vocabulary or more detail. The text we used for Sealife was a general piece of description that could be used in other ways – a flexible set of ideas.
We had been looking at scuba diving underwater signals and the children have been developing their own. This worked nicely with our action text as we used some of them to reinforce some of the language in the passage.
You might wonder if learning one piece of text leads to lots of the same pieces of work. However we spend just as much time extending and personalising the text as learning it verbatim. Those more confident writers stamp their personality on it and we tend to see glimpses or phrases from the Action Text in their work.
Some children just find it very difficult to begin a piece of writing, draw upon example ideas or even remember modelled writing from the teacher. We have found that the children needing the most support have recalled this Action Text really easily giving them a great starting point for their writing.
Using Myst 3 for Descriptive Writing
Aug 8th
It has been about a year since I began writing about using Myst 3 in the classroom. The last literacy unit of the term saw our Year 5 classes make their first forays into using the game and the second time we have used it in support of writing.
I love to use games in the classroom to support and inspire learning – at their best they are richly engaging and hugely motivating. This year we repeated much of the successful ways of introducing the game slowly; hooking the children into the narrative well before we switched on any computers. Myst 3 has such a rich narrative and back story this is not difficult to achieve.
One of the major differences in our class work this year was that I decided to take the more conventional route of working on descriptive writing. Last year we completed some great transactional text in the form of game guides. This year I began a simple task of improving on some simple sentences shared in a Google Doc for my students. The kids made such a good start to this that I invested the rest of our time on expanding on what we began.
Here is an example of one of my student’s work in Google Docs – you can see that I added a table of key vocabulary from the Myst narrative.
The smiley face and marking is something I added as the child progressed with their work. I used Insert>Comment in Google Docs for this (Shortcut: Control+M) These comments are useful in three ways:
- Coloured to stand out and be distinct from the rest of the child’s work.
- Timestamped automatically so that commenting and marking can be kept a track of.
- Named automatically so that a comment belongs to a particular user.
Have a look at my Marking work in Google Docs blog post for more ideas about common assessment of work in this way.
The second comment as I am sure you have realised is from the student who has responded in kind and let me know the changes she has made since my comments. Additionally she refers to some peer assessment that the class did in pairs to help review and improve their writing.
Alongside this work we helped the Year 2 children with their Myst unit – similar in our approach to last year but with different outcomes. The Year 2 teachers wanted their children to create some poetry based around their seaside curriculum unit. The Year 5s acted as Myst guides and helped the younger children explore the island in more detail, develop vocabulary and language collections and ideas for their seaside poems. Once these poems were completed we supported them in some simple Photostory work as a performance of the poems.
It has once again proven to be a hugely successful and engaging unit both within the remit of our own writing and in the process of supporting the younger children to engage with the game as well.
10 Digital Writing Opportunities You Probably Know and 10 You Probably Don't
Dec 12th
On Thursday I finally had some time to sit with our Key Stage 2 (junior) literacy coordinator and talk about how technology can support writing outcomes for the Primary Framework for Literacy.
It was a meeting all about ideas (my favourite) and we discussed the best ways that technology could support the process of writing and drive the eventual outcomes. In this post I have included a list of 10 literacy/writing tools or outcomes that, in my opinion, teachers should currently be aware of. Many of them are basic yet still powerful tools in the classroom that support children’s writing. They are in no particular order.
In addition I have also included 10 alternative tools that either offer a different perspective on digital writing or are a little known tool, that may have huge potential in the classroom. Not everything is free nor is it online – but the list will hopefully provide food for thought when you are looking at your next non-fiction or narrative unit with your class.
1 – Photostory – in my opinion one of the simplest and yet most powerful tools for primary literacy. I particularly appreciate the linear structure of the software, the ease with which you can incorporate speaking and listening and the quality of the multi-modal outcome.
2 – Powerpoint – I have never been a fan but PPT does offer a wider range of tools a functionality then some other presentation software. Children could create a non fiction text with linked contents and glossary – including the use of film and audio. There are of course heaps of online equivalents including 280 Slides, Zoho and Google Docs.
3 – SMART Notebook – in the same family as Powerpoint of course with the same sense of a non-chronological text could be created with it. This has proven a very effective tool for the children in our school as they have been watching Notebook in action since 2003. The children enjoy the ease with which you can work with the object based interface. A recent example of use in Year 4 in our school saw the children using screen capture to find, within a text, examples of language features and they then authored their own linked information texts.
4 – MovieMaker – (and Apple equivalents of course) simple and in the same boat as Photostory – it just gives you the complete package of allowing children to incorporate film into their texts. We have used it to create responses to the Aiden Gibbons film The Piano. The children added text, spoken word, soundtracks, film, still images (+effects) transitions etc.
5 – Word Processor – simple word processed documents could be done in Word or Google Docs. This year we have completed an instruction text on how to create and play a game in Sploder.
6 – Short Podcast – using Audacity or other recording/podcasting software children could create short scripted podcasts. They could be part of revision or even as an example of a balanced argument. The audio could then be imported and used in other applications.
7 – Film – there are lots of simple mini digital video cameras available now and ideally with lots in the classroom the children could create their own original films. They could present an interview, part of a story, balanced argument or an explanatory text for a different topic. We are looking at getting as many Flip Videos as we can get our hands on.
8 – Voicethread – still not that widely used, but one of the most important speaking and listening tools I have used in the classroom. Films, images or text can be explored – comments can be added via text, webcam, audio or even by mobile phone (!) – as the pupil is adding their comment they can also use a pen tool to highlight the feature they are discussing. Children could use Voicethread to model interview questions, structure responses to a narrative or to share ideas for story starters as we have done earlier this year. The collaborative feature provides them with a pool of ideas and support from their peers. Huge potential.
9 – Kar2ouche – you have to pay to use this but our Year 6 teachers have had great success with Kar2ouche to support their Macbeth work. Scenes can be storyboarded from a bank of illustrated graphics, audio can be recorded directly in or layered on top from a resource bank. There is room for the children to write a fuller narrative for the scenes or just to add speech bubbles. In the same category as Photostory due to the storyboarding but much more powerful.
10 – Myths and Legends Story Creator 2 – a free online version of Kar2ouche that focuses on a specific story type. Classes can have unique logins and they can record audio and build scenes from a set of graphics, their own images can be imported. A great alternative to Kar2ouche and perfect for the Myths and Legends unit.
No doubt that not much of that is new to many of you, however I hope that the next 10 alternative tools gives you further food for thought and something to explore for next terms’ writing units. It is an exciting time to be encouraging young children to enjoy writing as there are so many free tools that engage and take a different perspective on it all.
1 – Google Earth stories – the imagery presented to us in Google Earth provides a rich platform to inspire and develop stories. Work could be written into the placemarks or indeed media created elsewhere could be embedded within them like we have done. Information text located in the correct context would of course be ideal, for example an explanatory text about the features of a river system using the River Nile as it’s location or indeed the Valley of the Kings as the location for information in an Egyptian topic. Why not do a WW2 evacuee story and find a train station in a large city and then follow the line out into the countryside? Endless contexts for writing.
2 – Wordle – I thought this little tool would be great to analyse written stories in the same way Steve Kirkpatrick has done with his class. A Wordle could be a great way to introduce a text – exploring what is emphasised to help understand the type of writing it is taken from. Is it instruction, explanation – how can you tell? Another idea is that the children create a poem as a Wordle, it would certainly be challenging the form of conventional poetry.
3 – PicLit – this great creative writing tool allows you to drag vocabulary onto an image. Although you cannot upload your own images, the picture gallery is well stocked with inspiring pictures to explore. Children could try and tell the story within the picture or create some poetry in response to the image. PicLits can be saved, emailed and used elsewhere.
4 – Tag related search – using tag related searches can help children to understand the family of vocabulary that they could use. The relationships we generate between common words could be tapped into by a class to not only explore the images from Flickr, as in Tag Galaxy, but also broaden their vocabulary for written work. Don’t just focus on the images but explore the language too.
5 – Woices – place a recorded piece of a story audio on a map, combine the pieces into a route or journey. Woices will allow you to create a geotagged story or journey with audio being the main medium. Work could be narrative based or a simple recount of a recent class trip or journey into the local area. More informative tourist guide type outcomes could be scripted and added to the correct locations on a map.
6 – Cartoon strip – Tools such as Strip Generator and Make Beliefs Comix give children the opportunity to quickly generate short cartoon strips. The simplicity allows them to quickly explore aspects of narrative and speech as they take seconds to figure out how to use. I used Make Beliefs Comix today with my class to support their understanding of direct speech. Thanks to willie42 and MrKp for first suggesting these, we had a good lesson.
7 – Museum Box – Thanks to smilin7 for suggesting this one. Museum Box is a tool from the makers of the Myths and Legends resource above. It “provides the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box.” Children can add text, files, video, audio and images into the box and it looks like a really unique way to explore an event or historical figure. It would be good to help the children explore characterisation – what would we put in the box to help us understand Aunt Sponge? I look forward to exploring this more in the future.
8 – Textorizer – This is an online tool that allows you to upload an image, add text and then the image is recreated using the writing. It would be a good exploration of imagery and written text – perhaps a short poem created over series of lessons with a bold or distinctive image as a starting point. Then textorized as a final emalgamation of text and imagery. Thankyou to nzchrissy for pointing out this one.
9 – Bookr - I have always liked the pimpampum applications and in fact one of the very first blog posts I wrote was using Bubblr their comic strip tool. Bookr is from the same family and it is very easy to create a simple book using Flickr images, add some text and then publish.
10 – Adventure Island – Another resource that I discovered through Twitter, the thanks going this time to helenrf, Adventure Island provides a platform to write a reader defined adventure story. “Pupils create challenges and puzzles for the visitor to solve. As the visitor travels around a created Island, descriptive writing for each area encourages them to explore further. Will they be able to survive, and leave the Island, or will they remain forever … trapped?” This resource is based around a Y6/7 transition unit on Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo but could be used detached from that context – there is plenty of supporting ideas and tips on how to use it with a class.
Phew! It is always good to get all of those ideas buzzing in your head down in a blog post and I hope that there is something here for you to consider next time there is a writing outcome in a literacy unit. Throughout a writing unit I look to use at least one application that encourages speaking and listening, and refining of recorded speaking as a precursor to writing. I wouldn’t use these tools in isolation and some compliment each other very well.
This is by no means an exhaustive list but it certainly helps to illustrate the breadth of opportunity currently available to explore literacy in a digital form. As always, please let me know your thoughts, what you might add and what classroom experiences you have had of using them.
Google Earth is Our Paper – Part 5: A Week in Review
Dec 1st
Our week of storytelling in Google Earth has finished however I wanted to wrap up my reflections on working in this way. In this post I look back over the process and review the benefits you will reap and any challenges that you may face in implementing a similar unit.
A piece of Google Earth storytelling is definitely manageable within a week (5-6 hours) and in that sense is very flexible. The completed outcome from each child was a set of 6 placemarks that included:
- An embedded Vocaroo audio snippet of a rehearsed and planned piece of the story from James’ point of view.
- A written sentence that was a second draft of that first audio clip. An improved version that built in the language work we had done as a class to support the story.
You can see these two story elements in this screenshot of a child’s work.
If you would like to hear the audio, see the other 5 placemarks and the work as a whole then you can download the KMZ file here. During the week I worked with a supported literacy group and here is the audio work we completed together.
Challenges of digital storytelling in Google Earth
- Saving - this has been the biggest issue for us as the children will encounter temporary files saved locally in Google Earth. This is especially true when working on different laptops over a period of days. As the placemarks were the same, it led to confusion. If I was to do another unit of work with GE I would ensure that the children save work with their name included and I would also purge the local files at the end of every session. Another option is to explore the use of Google Maps.
- Uncertainty - as with most applications the more confident you are as a user the more you will get from it. Google Earth has a lot going on with various menus, folders and windows. The children often ran into a sticky spot if they could not find the item they were looking for or generally felt unfamiliar with the layout. If I was to repeat this unit again I would probably ensure there has been equivalent hours put in before hand that doesn’t just orientate them to the basics but allows them time to work with files, saving and the various layers of information. This would raise their level of confidence, consequently the layout of Google Earth would not be a hurdle to better storytelling.
Benefits of digital storytelling in Google Earth
- Visual - beginning with such a rich visual stimulus as Google Earth imagery gives the children such a different experience of storytelling then what they are used to. In this unit we benefited as a class not being straight-jacketed to a written, paper based plan. We were free to roam and explore the imagery we had, there were constraints that we agreed, but the plot was there in that imagery waiting for us to tease it out.
- Control - the children had control over the way they explored their story. They moved, tilted and zoomed, they controlled how their journey looked to them. I walked around the room during the week and they were all exerting this control over how the narrative space looked to them. I suppose in a small way this personalises the journey for them.
- Discovery - we began with a single location, a place I believed would be good to tell our escape story. It needed that decision, but from there we decided as a group what would happen. The snakey line you see in the example files or images could have easily taken us in another direction. The children discovered the elements of the story we included. In the first sessions we explored the local area in pairs and the children noted and discussed possible places of refuge. One child shared with us, by zooming in on the SMARTBoard, the building yard that we eventually chose to hide in as James. At that point int he lesson we had not even decided which way to turn from outside his house – but it was clear that the yard would provide us with lots of opportunities so we included it our escape. Let the children find their path, their journey – let them discover what is out there and allow the plot to be formed as you go.
- Embedding Media – Google Earth placemarks allow a whole host of media to be embedded in support of your story. We have added a simple audio player but you could easily have some drama work filmed and uploaded to a video hosting site, then embedded. That would be a great extension to what we have done and not too difficult either.
- Geotagged Narrative – beyond the huge variety of imagery children have as a starting point the sense of making your narrative happen in situ really appeals to me. You have to consider the tense that you work in, however the combination of narrative types in one place is a huge benefit to working in Google Earth. You could have written, spoken, filmed and drawn media all in the very location it is occurring.
Where do we go from here?
In my opinion I think that this week has challenged me to think of storytelling in a new way. I think I have a good understanding of digital narrative, but working in Google Earth and defining the plot in response to the environment turns it all on it’s head. My class were not trying to conjure up some bright idea, they were inspired by the images in front of them, by the landscape and make up of the location. Just think of all of those locations…just waiting to be a location for a story. (You could even do one on Mars or The Moon!)
Somewhere local to the school to begin would also be a great starting point – perhaps a trip to somewhere near the school and the children do a recount of the day. I would also like to explore the potential of social stories, children generating small snippets of narrative roughly under the same plotlines, in different placemarks but again in roughly the same location. These could then be shared and the individual child chooses a path for their character to take adding their peers narrative parts to form a whole.
Tear up the paper, be a location scout, let the landscape guide you, tip storytelling upside down and give it a shake – most of all let the children discover their own journey, their own path. You never know where it might lead.
Emerging from the Myst: Being inspired and making a start
Jul 19th
I am just about coming up for air from this year, the summer holidays are upon me now and I will finally have time to reflect upon some of the classroom activities that have gone on in this final term. This post is about using the adventure game Myst in a literacy unit with my Year 5s. It has been one of the most memorable projects we have worked on this year and I am so thankful we had the opportunity to explore this games based learning approach. I hope to reflect here and in future posts what it is like to handle this type of exploration, discovery, learning and writing in my classroom.
Tim Rylands
The unit is completely inspired by the work of Tim Rylands and more recently by the work of Derek Robertson and his colleagues in LTS’s Consolarium. I was really interested in how the Scottish school in the pilot project had teamed up their older children with a younger age group. At the beginning of this term I had some quality time to work with our Key Stage 1 Literacy coordinator and show her the game and lay down my ideas. This was an important step as it forced me to articulate and crystallise my own thoughts on what the game could do and also perhaps get some buy-in from another colleague. Cathy immediately saw the huge potential to motivate the boys in her own class and so ideas began to turn into plans.
An ideal environment?
For over a year now I have been eyeing the possibility of this literacy unit with my children and with the increasing number of laptops in my room it finally seemed possible. Of course having a 1:1 resource is no prerequisite for this unit to take place as Tim Ryland’s video clips show a single user (the teacher) and the class watching on – but I imagined that many children would want to get their hands on the game themselves and I was also curious to explore what was possible with individual use. 30 laptops 30 games.
That is what we went for and considering the games cost us just over £4 each it was not particularly expensive to achieve. For me this was the ideal environment because I wanted the children to be the explorers – but much (as proved by many before me) can be achieved with just one copy of the game. Individual games did give the children a free rein, they owned the pace by which they explored and to some degree by which they wrote. Classroom organisation was a little more complex but importantly the children defined the game pace.
Hybrid text
Many people have approached the use of the game to help inspire descriptive writing and narrative that draws upon the rich environment that a player can explore. Many different text types can be explored and so I decided to work on a hybrid text that could effortlessly draw in some of these into one. When exploring the game myself I found it useful to read a walkthrough guide that would in turn help me guide the children if needed. A game guide or walkthrough has the potential to be stylistically descriptive as well as having functional parts. In addition the games’ puzzles could be explained using instructional language. I decided on the game guide as the written piece because of these extended possibilities.
Games based learning at school
This Myst unit forms part of a wider school strategy to incorporate the best of games based learning in the classroom. It has proven to be very cost effective as mentioned above and the return has been amazing – the feedback from the chidren has been extremely positive. At our school we have role play corners throughout the early years and up to the Year 3 classes with a big emphasis on this sort of play. The children enjoy games and we have seen them interact using their Nintendo DS consoles for a long time now – the language of gaming is something they are very familiar with. Harnessing the enthusiasm for it is the key. During this unit directing their enthusiasm to perhaps more traditional outcomes (writing) has sometimes felt awkward but nonetheless important. We will be beginning a Nintendo DS project in Year 4 next year as once again we are inspired by those working in Scotland. Beyond these new projects something that has proven very successful is the use of games to promote the development of mental maths skills. This has been a school target and in Year 5 we have been highlighting a variety of different games and online activities that can help the children via our school del.icio.us bookmarking account.
Making a start
Although Myst is a game I wanted to retain the sense of narrative and not just say from the outset that we will be using a computer game. I knew that Myst would capture their attention, but I wanted to draw them in without even starting the game – in my own way. A while ago I bought my wife a wooden chest and filled it with her Christmas gifts, the chest was going to be a key prop in the tense opening of this literacy unit.
The Myst game pivots upon the special powers that books have in the story, so I placed a large anonymous book inside – a recipe book from home but I concealed the spine. With much intrigue and hushing of my voice I told the children that I had just taken delivery of this chest. No “This is what we are doing today in literacy…” or lesson objectives, just straight into talk about the box. Without opening it we talked about what it could be, what it could contain, why it could be special. I soon realised that within a few minutes the children were in that wonderful place between disbelief and intrigue. They not only asked questions about the box and the contents but how it could have arrived, who might have brought it – the anonymity of it all troubled and intrigued them.
On opening the box I told the children that I had received 2 scrolls throughout the week that told me of the arrival of something for the class (the box) and instructions not to open whatever was inside. I explained that I had been informed that the book has great power and carefully took it out of the chest, showing the children. We then talked about what this power could be, what properties it could have and how it may be magical (In the game the books are called Ages, a written creation that becomes a physical place which you can link into) The third scroll was inside the chest. I had written a code for the children to break, using Puzzlemaker - a message that would add another layer of mystery to the tale so far.
The children spent the next 20 minutes or so cracking the number/letter code and we shared our discoveries as a class as it progressed. Of course the code reveals more questions then answers and refers to the beginning of some sort of journey. You will have to break the code to read it in full!
We sat together and discussed the message that had been revealed from the code and questioned what meaning we could attriubute to it, what we knew already and what was yet to be revealed. Without saying much more, other than explaining that I was following instructions, I fired up the game and we watched the opening sequence of the game and the title film. The timing is crucial here, as I wanted to finish the lesson with this tiny glimpse of what was to come – the game begins overlooking a canyon in a place called Tomahnha, I moved the mouse and showed that we were in control and the journey had started, I stopped and said that it was time to finish. There were cries of disappointment and a great buzz as they left for assembly – our Myst adventure had begun!
In my next post about Myst I will explore how our Year 5 children became Myst Ambassadors and took the game to the Year 2s, and Gemma Coleman one of the Year 2 teachers will be explaining how it fitted in with them and their own approach to the unit.
