Some work produced by a small group of my students as part of an ongoing project working towards creating an international news channel for the school.
This has provided a motivational and meaningful context for situated language production. The learners communicate through English during every stage as they prepare to share stories about what is happening in their individual countries in English.
I've only been at the school a few weeks and it's been great fun teaching multilingual learners again. The class is a wonderful blend of Spanish, Polish, Italian, Turkish and Iranian people with unique and interesting perspectives on the world.
The project has been scaffolded through building journalistic lexis and knowledge of collocations, writing articles, recording audio reports, dubbing television news and writing and presenting original news stories based on found footage (which is then used as a backdrop).
Here's a short clip from my presentation at today's IATEFL LTSIG in Liverpool that gives an overview of what Urban Chronicles is about. I've made a page dedicated to the project with my slides, instructions and links for those who would like to join in or do something similar.
I had an absolutely fantastic time giving my "playshop" this morning "M-learning in and out of the classroom: Locative Play and Mobile Media Creation". The attendees were a bright, eclectic and creative bunch of motivated teachers who approached the hands-on section with such vigour that I often felt guilty interrupting them to check on their progress and supply feedback.
Some lively and critical discussion followed each of the group presentations and i've already heard that several of the participants from different schools in Dublin are going to get together and try to take what they learned today further and adapt and build upon it to apply to their own teaching context. I'll be excited to see how that turns out and very happy to help out wherever I can.
For those who were unable to attend I've embedded a clip of the slides I prepared to introduce the first section. I had to remove some of the embedded videos clips and also the invader clip (which can be found by clicking on the yellow Invader link at the top of this page) to keep the file size down to a manageable level.
Slides from my presentation on pervasive games and mobile technologies.
Abstract
Every space is a learning space. Thanks to the rapidly increasing adoption of mobile communications and wireless technologies, language educators are now empowered to sculpt interactions and design learning experiences using the real world as their canvas. City streets, shopping centres, cafés and cemeteries can be augmented with new layers of meaning and narrative as learner/players use their language skills to navigate the chaotic and unpredictable environment of everyday life and achieve their objectives.
Spatially expanded games provide a natural way to situate language production in context-rich, authentic settings, in contrast to the comparatively sterile confines of the traditional classroom. They are multimodal, multi-sensory and highly immersive experiences. In this session I intend to explore the learning potential of technology-enhanced urban games and the pedagogic and philosophical foundations upon which I base these ideas. I will also critique current trends in gamification and propose a more ethical way forward. To illustrate this, I will provide an example of an ongoing research project that spans two cities in the north of Portugal, sharing my experience of several cycles of organising the game and my role as a participant observer. At this juncture I will play and display some of the audio, video, text and photographs that were generated through gameplay. To conclude, I will suggest ways in which easily available, off-the-shelf technologies can be combined to provide the scaffolding for their development and the potential pitfalls that a teacher-as-game-designer might encounter.
