Angry Birds in the Classroom

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirds

I'm sure that you are all familiar with Prensky's ITC decree that as teachers, we need to 'engage or enrage' our students. In his research he cites the use of game based learning by engineers and how successful it was at teaching concepts and encouraging collaborative learning. I don't know about you, but my programming skills are not very advanced, in fact, I feel pretty clever if I can resize a Youtube clip! But we don't need to create our own games and programs when there are already so many out there.

A great example is the work of Brisbane-based teacher Lachlan Hull and his use of Angry Birds in his prep year classroom.  I was lucky enough to meet Lachlan last year at a BCE ICT sharing session. He has now taken his ideas around the world, presenting his ideas in Boston at the 'Building Learning Communities' conference July, 2013. Here is a clip of Lachlan, telling us how he makes it all work:

A Classroom Full of Angry Birds

and an interview where he discusses using Angry Birds and classroom management tool Class Dojo:

Lachlan Hull interview

Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Don't ever forget about the power of picture books in the classroom!  I regularly use them with all primary school children. They find them engaging and more than entertaining. As students get so much of their information online and very often from Youtube, it is important that their visual literacy skills are up to scratch.

In fact the whole concept of literacy is currently in a state of upheaval. We are moving on from multimedia to hypermedia. This term is derived from hypertext and relates to how today, we not only get our information in a variety of different mediums, but we are now presenting it in multimodal forms: text, picture, videos and any number of combinations of media.  If you would like to find out more here is a very interesting paper on this concept:

Visual Literacy and the Classroom