Playstation+in+classroom

=__**Playstation Within My Classroom Programme.**__=

__Why I decided to do it.__

After going to the breakout at Conference I was inspired. I also wanted an experience in my classroom that could boost my students writing. The breakout was about Xbox 360, but I am more familiar with the Playstation consoles. I was going to use my old PS2 until one of my parents offered to by a PS3 for my class.

I started with ‘Little Big Planet’ as a) it was a game I already had at home, and b) it is simple platform game that almost anybody could play. Nice and simple to start of with for the children that don’t have Playstations at home. The students loved it and soon got into the new routine.

When we changed topics in term 2 I changed games and bought in ‘Civilisation Revolution’ as more of a strategy solving game.

The students have 30mins to blog after going on the Playstation. They started with an average of 5-10mins of blogging and are now blogging for 20-25mins on average, improving description and flow of ideas in just 1 ½ terms. The students are also becoming better problem solvers as well.

I am not an expert of the games and I don’t need to be, with me not knowing what to do it has made the students find the answers for themselves or figure it out through trial and error.

I have had to rethink the way I group the children as I couldn’t have a group of 8 students on the Playstation at 1 time. I had to go with 7 groups of 4 where each child in the group had a role:

The students decided that the researcher game was really boring so we changed to 2 controllers instead, alternating each time. Whoever was not on that day did the researchers job.
 * Navigator
 * Controller
 * Researcher
 * Journalist

Some things that might help are: