Last Saturday we attended the ICT in Education conference in Tipperary Institute, Thurles. We were there to talk about ‘Game-based Learning in Virtual Worlds‘ and to meet with pioneering educators.

The day got off to a wonderful start with Christian Payne speaking on ‘Mobile Story Making’, ostensibly, but really regaling us with tales of life lived to the full. Entertaining, affecting, inspiring.

ICT in Education 2011 : Christian Payne : Mobile Story Making from StudioSix @ Tipperary Institute on Vimeo.

A few soundbites we took particular note of were –

• Knowing is not doing. Only doing is doing
• Location is the bridge between online & offline
• Don’t write words, write stories

Next up was Ciaran McCormack on ‘Preparing our teachers for the Storytellers of tomorrow’. He told us when teenagers were asked to comment on schools 50% said it was boring while 42% said it was tiring.  These results show that there is a real lack of engagement on behalf of students and that we as educators have to find new ways to engage, inspire and excite students about their learning. (Or as the Game Based Learning theorist  James Paul Gee says give them an emotional connection to learning!) And then he nailed the whole point of storytelling – “It’s not about the production, it’s about the process”.

One of our favourite workshops of the day was, without a doubt, Stephen’s Howell’s Scratch tutorial – the funniest thing was looking around the room and seeing all of these teachers with big childlike grins on their faces making their “sprite” do cartwheels.  Scratch is just a fantastic introduction to programming for kids. Then Stephen showed his amazing hack for the kinect – real time digital puppeteering – just fantastic.  Here are some useful links that Stephen mentioned as part of his presentation:

National Scratch Competition: http://www.scratch.ie/

Transition Year Scratch Workbook: http://www.scratch.ie/students

Scratch & Kinect (Stephen’s blog)

Scratch and Kinect from Stephen Howell on Vimeo.