Gaming Glow Groups in Dundee
Overview
In this cookbook, Jo Bell of Dundee City Council explains how a Glow Group provides support for practitioners using games-based learning technologies, such as the Nintendo Wii, in the classroom.
Context
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The use of games-based technologies in Dundee schools has grown rapidly over the last couple of years. The council holds a set of gaming resources, such as class sets of Nintendo DS and Braining Training software, which can be loaned out to schools for a term at a time. In order to manage this loan process, and to provide information, support and the opportunity to share good practice, a number of Glow Groups have been created.
The first of these Groups is the Gaming Glow Group, created on the Dundee City Council authority site, and open to all staff and pupils across the city. A number of sub-groups have also been created, for specific groups or projects. The Gaming Staff Zone, for example, is open only to staff and provides information about the centrally-held resources and the process for bidding for these.
Jo Bell demonstrates the Gaming Glow Groups
The bidding process through which schools can borrow gaming resources has developed considerably over the last 18 months. Initially, bids were fairly brief: staff would, for example, outline the resources they wanted to borrow and how they were hoping to use them. The Gaming Staff Zone now provides information on how games-based projects support the delivery of Curriculum for Excellence and links to research on the potential of games-based learning. Guidance on submitting bids and sample documents are also displayed. Bids submitted by practitioners now typically include reference to specific CfE outcomes, detailed planning of how a project will be organised, and the impact that it will have on learners. The level of detail in these bids reflect the commitment of the teachers involved to the projects, and has been invaluable in ensuring that the resources have been well used. As Jo comments, these bids – shared in the discussion board in the Glow Group – are also tremendously helpful to other practitioners wanting to plan similar projects themselves.
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Once schools have had their bid approved and received the gaming resources, the Gaming Glow Group comes into its own as a collaborative area where staff and pupils can share their learning. Downfield Primary School, for example, have used a discussion board to reflect on their use of Braining Training software. One pupil when asked his initial thoughts on using a Nintendo DS in class commented “when they said we had the nintendo I JUMPED IN JOY. I was really excited”! Mid-way through the project, another pupil commented “I love the DS because it is so fun and you get lots of games and now that we are half way through I know more than I used to on the games. And I am learning a lot more.” And asked about their favourite games at the end of the project, one pupil concluded “My favourite game is Low to High because I like memory games and I’m really good at it. I have the best score in the class.” It’s interesting to see from the discussion board that the staff involved felt similarly motivated and determined to improve their scores!
Two schools – Longhaugh and Charlestown primaries – used the Glow Group to share their experiences of using the Little Big Planet software on the PS3 . During the project, Jo set the pupils a number of challenges, such as taking photographs of the game characters, designing their own characters and finally designing their own levels for the game. The challenges were set, and the pupils’ work displayed, in the Glow Group. Throughout the project, pupils in the two schools used a discussion board to share their learning and then finally met face-to-face in a Glow Meet session. The staff involved in the project uploaded their plans to the Glow Group, including advice about how to organise the classroom to manage a games-based learning project. This provides a superb starting point for the next practitioners borrowing the equipment and embarking on a similar project.
Ingredients
The Gaming Glow Groups were created on the local authority site within Glow, so that all schools were able to access them. School staff generally do not have the permissions to create Glow Groups on their local authority site; if you are interested in a project, where you would like all schools in your authority to have access to a Glow Group, contact the Site Collection Administrator (SCA) for your authority who will be able to give you advice about how such a Group can be created and run. For contact information for your local authority SCA, click here.
Recipe
Once the Glow Groups had been created, Jo has used a number of Glow web parts, such as the Text Editor, to display images, text, hyperlinks and video clips.
The ‘how-to’ clips below show how to use Text Editor in a similar way:
* adding a Text Editor web part to a page and entering text
* adding an image to a Text Editor web part
* creating a hyperlink in a Text Editor web part
* displaying text, images and hyperlinks in a table in Text Editor
* displaying video in a Text Editor web part
Impact
The use of Glow to bid for resources has had a huge impact in Dundee schools. The same process is used elsewhere, to bid for early years resources, and has been similarly popular.
Jo Bell discusses the impact of Glow
Jo comments that the bidding process, which would previously have been done by email, has become far more effectively managed through Glow. Information on bids is shared, and the Glow Group has thus become a forum where practitioners can share their ideas and resources in a way that they wouldn’t have been able to do before.
Jo concludes “That’s great going forward into the age of Curriculum for Excellence, where everyone’s scrambling about to find new ideas, ways to motivate children and to develop cross-curricular projects. Gaming delivers all this, and so does Glow, so they marry well together.”