The winners will be announced on the 19th of November.
Wilsden is up against 70 other schools in the UK.
Information on the ICT Excellence award can be found here
The technical support and ICT consultancy has been providing by myself and all of the work has been carried out by the folks at Primary Technology.
Wilsden is only a small village compared to most in Bradford so this level of recognition is another very important notch on the post for the school as the head teacher has just retired.
I have been following the stuff about Project Natal and it looks like it could be really good for education.
I will try to summarize project Natal:
Move your whole body instead of your fingers. It has facial/sound recognition. I love how interactive project natal is and that makes it perfect for educational use.
I have 2 problems with Natal:
1) it requies an xbox360. By default schools assume an xbox360 is an arcade gaming console so the main function is gaming.
2) I don’t know how to code/develop games for Xbox 360 (I’m hoping that flash games will be playable as most educational games are flash based).
There needs to be a discussion into integrating this new type of full body control into new games. The functions and methods need to be simply integrated into existing resources. For example, if you have an old flash game that is just point + click. How does this new control type interface with that? Can you point at an object or do you have to slap it? what is a click, what isn’t? What is a drag/drop & What isn’t? How do we storage faces for facial recognition? Does this need to be part of the Windows Live login process? In which case will all pupils need a live account?
In an ideal world it would be open source but thats not going to happen. I will keep my ears to the ground and report back 🙂
As a side note, just imagine if the sensor comes out for vista or xp, how amazing would that be? This type of interactivity with your OS with full application support would make my brain drool.
I see this as being the future so I will be asking the guys at Primary Tech to look into it 🙂
If you have your browsers home page set to http://primaryt.co.uk/google then it will automatically redirect you to the new site. You might want to change your browsers home page, this is available on the bottom right hand side of the page 🙂
I’m working on a new part of Primary School ICT.com / Safe Search which will give game makers the ability to post scores through an API to a central database directly from their flash/web based games.
This should allow schools and content providers to get a rough estimate of the usage and impact of games in primary schools.
Although we will not be creating any games we will have a database of thousands of games (non API registered) that will cover the whole curriculum and will be displayed in an easy to use, teacher and pupil friendly interface 🙂
The coolest thing is that kids will be able to compete globally across a wide range of games, I see this as being the best way to encourage usage on top of growing communities.
I hope not to charge for this, I’m aiming to have a premium state product model where content providers pay if their API post usage goes above a certain % of visits to their resources start to excessively built their revenue stream but damage ours.
