The planned extension of last session’s “Guitar Hero” transition project from Musselburgh Grammar and its feeder primaries to the whole of East Lothian gets a mention in today’s Edinburgh Evening News:
It was so successful it is now being rolled out across almost all primary and secondary schools in the county.
Pupils used the themes in the game as the basis for art, music, PE and English projects. They then shared their work with children who had come from other primary schools.
They introduced the project to help ease the transition for primary seven pupils moving up to Musselburgh Grammar School. (Link)
You’ll find more on the use of Guitar Hero to provide a context for learning on the Learning & Teaching Scotland ICT in Education site.
Twitter, if you’ve not already encountered it, is a service worth knowing about. It’s like really simple blogging, but, with each post limited to 140 characters, is used more for conversational updates. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
It’s used by a wide range of people and organisations, from 10 Downing Street to Stephen Fry to quite a few of the online education community. How might schools use it? Here are some possibilities:
- Use text message Twitter updates to post on-the-spot updates from school trips or visits
- Display the Twitter updates in the sidebar of the school or class blog
- Follow a topical Twitterer - such as Barack Obama - to get news stories faster than radio or TV
Now you can display your latest Twitter updates (or anyone else’s) using a widget on your edubuzz WordPress blog using Rick’s Twitter for WordPress plugin. Just activate the plugin and configure your Twitter widget(s).
