This week will bring to a close my ICT blog, at least for the moment as we have just completed our final ICT lesson. The session was a continuation on last week’s session on computer programming, this time we looked at Simulations, Modelling and M learning.

Simulations
Computer simulations provide a great chance to engage in an activity that a book or playground could never create. Simulations in the classroom allow the children to engage in a fantasy world or situation where they can predict the outcome without fear of causing any real world damage to themselves or their surrounding.

There are some great examples of games on this website.

http://www.kenttrustweb.org.uk

In today’s lesson we focused on a game called Myst. The game is used widely in schools by a teacher cum consultant Tim Rylands (charging £1000 a day apparently) to bring a touch of creativity to English Literacy lessons and help children with their story writing.

Find out more about Tim here - http://www.timrylands.com/

In the next part of the lesson we looked at modelling. Modelling is a great way for children to get engage with a simulation and change the outcome. If this can be tied in with another subject the children have worked on, the changes in the simulation  will have more potential for helping the children with their learning.

Mobile Learning or M Learning is the use of handheld devices for learning outside the classroom. Thing such as Ipads and other tablets can now be used by children on the move. Places such as museums have taken note of this and often you will find a huge amount of learning support materials to be used on mobile learning devices at these establishments.

A couple of other websites that we looked at -

www.voki.com – a site on which children can create speaking avatars – a great addition to an English lesson.

www.wordle.net – this site takes a block of text and makes word clouds! I tried to enter part of today’s blog into it however as always seems to be the case, something went wrong! I will update once I can get it to work!

Thanks everyone for reading! Who know when the next entry will be!