I’ve just got back from the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum in Manchester, I arrived on Monday evening to find myself checking into a beautiful room with a spectacular view of the city. Later in the evening I attended a very beneficial TeachMeet, some particular highlights of this for me were:
- Dawn’s Games Based Learning with her primary school class, using DS’s and Wii’s to teach various curriculum subjects, more info can be found here and here. Using games in such a positive way in the classroom is certainly of great interest to me and I can really see this as a way to inspire students.
- The SSAT Digital Leaders programme – students in school training and supporting staff.
- Heathfield Primary school’s fantastic Year 6 blog.
The main event took place on Tuesday and from what I hear there was a great selection of work shops (I didn’t see any of them, though, as I was presenting at my own one!). The workshops running throughout the day were the following:
- Taking IT Global by Mandeep Atwal
- Outdoor Learning & Technology by David Rogers
- From the Cloud to the Classroom by Guy Shearer
- Creative use of Technology in the Classroom by Dan Roberts
- Office 2010 in the Classroom by Stuart Ball
- Creating Games with Kodu by myself!
You can read more about the workshops here.
My Session – Creating Games with Kodu
My session began by looking at what Kodu is and who can use it. I gave a demonstration of how to make a very simple game (despite being simple I still managed to keep losing!). This was basically just a flat world with a tree, a castle and some apples to collect. I then demonstrated how to program a character to collect the apples to score points and finally added an enemy to shoot at the player!
After this, my delegates sampled an example of a starter activity from my scheme of work which involves matching the correct Kodu instructions together to give various commands. They all did very well!
Following this I introduced my website which contains a complete scheme of work for teaching Kodu, this is available on the link below:
I also shared some other online resources which are very useful when teaching with Kodu:
Thank you to everyone who attended my workshops, I hope you all enjoyed the session and can take some of the skills back to your classroom. I very much appreciated the positive feedback on Twitter!
Also on Tuesday we were lucky enough to have two fantastic keynote speakers to talk to us, Professor Sugata Mitra famous for his ‘Hole in the wall’ project and Michael Furdyk Co-founder of the young person’s online community, Taking IT Global. Both were excellent and very inspiring. I would certainly like to experiment with some of Sugata’s work where children teach themselves, I strongly believe this will help them become more independent thinkers.
One of my highlights of the event was winning a Microsoft Innovative Teacher award, I didn’t know I would be getting this so was very excited! Just have to make sure I live up to the title now!
To read more about the event visit the Microsoft Blog or check out #ukief10 on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!