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How to use Endless Ocean and the Wii in the Classroom…

I recently delivered some training days and support for primary teachers wanting to use the Nintendo Wii game ‘Endless Ocean’ in the classroom. It’s a really great game for using across the curriculum in everything from literacy and maths to art.

Here are a number of resources those of you who are interested in using the Nintendo wii in the classroom.

I found the following blogs particularly useful:

Tom Barrett’s Blog – Useful posts and links to his planning using Endless Ocean in the classroom

The Consolarium – Useful site with case studies and resources for using games across the curriculum.

Hot Milky Drink – Derek Robertson’s blog on using various games and consoles in the classroom

Below are a selection of planning documents showing the sort of activities we used with students. These included writing a divers blog, keeping a tally of the number of different species encountered, using excel to creat charts to interpret that data, scripting and recording either an audio or video interview with a ‘diver’ and creating presentations following reasearch into different species. These presentations were either done through Kar2ouche, Power Point, Comic Life or collated through a class Wiki using Wiki Spaces.

endless ocean planning – My planning that I used for an activity day at the CLC that explored using Endless Ocean across the curriculum – Ive slightly adapted it to show a range of activities that could be done over a week or half term.

Below are a number of the student resources we created to guide them in their activities.

Creating a Diving Record in Excel

Instructions on how to set up Excel to create  a chart representing the tallied number of species.

Diving Log

Simple tally chart to collect number of different species encountered.

How to blog

Instructions on how to use a free word press blog (can also be created for free with EduBlogs) to keep a divers journal.

Endless Ocean Advert Script

Simple writing frame to get the children started with writing a script.

Workshop Resources – Using Endless Ocean in the Classroom

Here are some of the resources from the workshop on using the Nintendo Wii game ‘Endless Ocean’ in the classroom delivered at the Emerging Technologies Conference on 25th September.

Presentation – The presentation on what the CLC has done so far with Endless Ocean and the Wii

Web Resources

The Consolarium – Learning and Teaching Scotlands excellent site with advice and case studies on using games based learning in the classroom.

Tom Barrett – ICT in my Classroom – Tom has been using Endless Ocean with his class and has planned some fantastic activities aimed at KS2. He has also shared his Literacy planning through Google Docs.

Twitter – Follow Tom – Tom has been updating his tweets about Endless Ocean in the Classroom – a good up to the minute guide with practical ideas

Game Making Resources – Using the free resource Game Maker in the classroom – planning for KS2

Adventure Author – Game Making with Literacy links – suitable for upper KS2 and Ks3. Includes teaching resources.

Activity-day-plan

More Learning with the Nintendo Wii

Royd Nursery and Infants visited on the 29th June and 1st July to take part in a similar day to Nook Lane Juniors.

The aim of the day was to explore how schools could embed games technology in teaching and learning and an opportunity for the Y2 pupils to try out a number of different activities using ICT.

The day was a resounding success and both teaching staff and pupils enjoyed it thoroughly. Based around the theme ‘Under the Sea’ which the Y2 pupils had been studying in school, a number of different activities were set up around the room. These included virtual ‘diving’ using the Wii and

keeping a tally of different creatures encountered, data handling – sorting creatures using an interactive white board, creating storyboards using kar2ouche, taking photos and making a short news story interviewing the divers using Digital Blue cameras and software.

Pupils were also encouraged to create and add to concept maps throughout the day to keep a record of what they had learnt and understood about ‘Under the Sea’.

So why use games technology in the classroom?

A number of recent reports published by BECTA (2005), Futurelabs (2005, 2006) and ELSPA (2006) provide evidence that suggests that using computer games in the classroom can acieve the following:

•Motivating learners to succeed and to continually improve •Fostering self-esteem, self-determination and enhancing self-image •Facilitating collaborative learning •Implicitly develop learners ability to observe, question, hypothesise and test •facilitate metacognitive reflection •Develop complex problem-solving skills •Make school an exciting place to be •Offering inroads into other curricular areas.

The aim of the project now is to move it forwards across the partnership of primaries. This will start with bringing a cross partnership group of G & T pupils together in October drawn from Y2 and Y5 who will carry out a similar activity.

Teaching staff are welcome to attend and take part and take the new skills and ideas back into school to try there.

We will also have a Nintendo Wii plus titles to loan out to schools who wish to follow up the work back in school with support.

Intersted in trying out computer games technology in your teaching?

Check out the following sites:

Consolarium – Scottish Centre for Games and Learning

Hot Milky Drink – Derek Robertson’s Blog on Games and Learning

Tim Rylands – Using Myst in the Classroom

Using Twitter in the Classroom

We’ve been using Twitter in our computer games project in which pupils from local primary schools have been using Endless Ocean.

Twitter seems to be the latest ‘big thing’ in web 2.0 – more and more people are using it to stay in touch, keep informed and network with each other. I check my Twitter updates every day now alongside my emails to see what other teachers are discussing about the world of technology and education.

Some refer to Twitter as ‘micro-blogging’ – messages are restricted to 140 characters or fewer. It is a way of sending frequent, quick messages. Others can choose to follow you and so be kept up to date with your latest messages and you can follow others and therefore keep up to date with them.

Additionally you can Twitter from your mobile phone so you can keep in touch on the move. Catherine at Sheffield South City Learning Centre recently wrote a great post about it on the SSCLC blog.

So, How can Twitter be used in the classroom and more importantly – Why?..

Mark Warner wrote a great article on the Web here. He lists 25 inspiring ways to use Twitter in the classroom.

In particular, I like the following ideas:

• Summarise topics / issues as tweets (140 characters or less remember!). Students could produce fictional tweets between two historical characters such as King Harold and William the Conqueror
• Collate classroom views i.e. save or spend in the current economic climate

We tried number 17 – Communicate with Experts. As part of the Endless Ocean Games project we have been lucky enough to contact an American Marine Biologist and have asked her questions about the world’s oceans and the life in them. Although we have had a few problems with time differences, this has been really a really enjoyable and useful exercise. Pupils will be able to post follow up questions and see her answers back at school.

Twitter is unfortunately blocked through YHGfL but Tweetdeck isn’t as yet. From an Internet Safety point of view, users can protect their updates and show only people they want to their messages. How to do this is explained here.

Learning Using Nintendo Wii

Yesterday we had year 6 pupil’s from Nook Lane Junior School visiting the CLC to take part in an exciting project using games technology in learning.

The theme for the day was ‘Oceans’ and the pupils took part in a number of cross curricular activities based around the game ‘Endless Ocean’ using the Nintendo Wii games platform. This was based on a project originally run in Primary Schools in Stirling and led by Margaret Cassidy who works in e-learning for Stirling. I was also influenced by Derek Robertson – a proponent of teaching using games through his blog ‘hotmilkydrink’. He talks about the potential of Endless Ocean as a classroom tool on his fantastic games in the classroom blog here.

We have three height adjustable  interactive whiteboards in our new 99 metre square learning space. On two of the whiteboards pupils used the Nintendo Wii and were tasked with diving in the fictional Maurai Sea to look for rare and exotic sea creatures. The pupils were very excited to discover a humped back whale and hammer head sharks as well as befriending bottle nosed dolphins and african penguins!

But they weren’t just playing games – they had the opportunity to write an interview script, interview deep sea ‘divers’  and appear in their own chat show, interpret data from the dives, create informative presentations about different species of sea creatures and carry out important research.

We had an interesting video conference with pupils from three primary schools in Scotland who have been using Nintendo Wii’s in the classroom and used Endless Ocean as the basis of a whole terms topic for cross curricular learning. The pupils had a chance to share tips and tricks for playing the game as well as asking questions about what they’d learnt. Cowie primary were very helpful in exaplining the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates.

The pupils also had an opportunity to contribute to the ‘wonder wall’ – based on an idea in Futurelabs ‘Enquiring Minds’ project using the idea of student based open enquiry. This was an interactive whiteboard with flipchart software where they could come and write any questions they had about ‘oceans’. Pupils were also encouraged to contribute to the answers too.

All in all, it was a very successful day and the pupils and teachers reported that they really enjoyed the activities. We will be repeating it on 29th June and 1st july with year 2 pupils and then the hope is that we can look to rolling it out (using other ‘educational’ titles) across the partnership schools who express interest.