Samorost 2
I’ve been using Samorost 2 with my literacy group since hearing about it from Ewan McIntosh at the Derbyshire LA ICT conference. I have never seen my group so engaged! The children, with varying types and degrees of special needs, found the problem solving and rich graphics incredibly engaging. One of my more troublesome pupils was writing sentences about it long after the lesson had finished.
To prevent going over old ground, you can read more on the subject here and here from Ewan and here from Kim Pericles. What I will say is that a game like this means all of my class can access it on a number of levels, with specific open questions aimed at individuals. So far it’s working well…
November 22nd, 2007 at 7:11 am
Yay! Just what we wanted to see. If you get a chance to blog any of their writing, even if it’s just sentences or short paragraphs, please do!
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am
Well, I could. However, I have the lowest ability keystage 3 group in a special needs school so we are at the stage of filling in spaces for adjectives in sentences that have been written down for them. I have high hopes that by the end of the school year we can enable at least half of the class to have the confidence to write two or three sentences unaided, even if the spelling ends up being a bit dodgy. This would be fantastic progress! Another big advantage of using games is the impact on speaking and listening. For my class this is the most important element at the moment. The students are really motivated so what they say is far more substantial than what we would normally hear. I’m hoping to do some shared writing in the next week so I will post the resulting masterpiece with a bit of a commentary on how the game has made a difference. Hopefully, this will be a springboard for the students to start writing for themselves. I feel like we’re in a unique situation where a lot of web 2.0 applications are difficult to implement in the school I teach at, mainly due to the amount of text involved. However, I know we aren’t the only special school around so there must be hundreds of school staff in the same situation.
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Hi, have you heard the Booruch podcasts? David works in SEN too.
http://booruch.libsyn.com
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Yes and I’ve been trying to remember what it was called so I could check it out. Thank you!
November 23rd, 2007 at 7:47 am
I’ve used Samorost 1 this week to start a creative writing piece for a very noisy and challenging group of boys. They played the game and then showed it to the rest of the class and acted as teachers for the day! The whole group worked so well for the lesson it was amazing and most welcome. Moving onto Samorost 2 next week. The same group of boys are blogging match reports for their beloved Rangers/Man Utd which also means I got 19 pieces of writing out of them in three weeks, and without a struggle to do so! By Harry I doth lovest IT and the way it gets the lads to write when they wouldn’t before.
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:37 am
The talking and listening aspects of learning are vitally important. The students I work with are from predominantly non-English speaking backgrounds, so it’s really necessary and important for the kids to hear the English language in all its different forms before they can be expected to write it down.
The opportunities to play with the language, to change word order, to experiment with other words, find better words, build vocab and background knowledge all present themselves when using both samorost and othe web 2.0 aplications.
Keep at the talking because its just (more?) as important as the writing