School’s Out! - Merry Christmas

Dec 23 2006

School’s Out! - Merry Christmas

Published by tbarrett at 10:42 am under My class

On wednesday we broke up for our Christmas break - so have a good one!

At the end of every term we have a day when the children bring in toys and just relax a bit and we have a bit of a party - well we are breaking up for the holidays!! This year was no exception apart from the fact that must have been the most high-tech toy day I have ever had.

My 10 and 11 year old children brought in the usual Scrabble and Operation type board games - there was even an appearance of the new Monopoly with the credit card! But these traditional board games dwindled in number compared to the technology the kids brought in with them.

I was really surprised - I knew that my kids have a far greater propensity to technology than I imagined, but there was such a range of personal technology on show.

There were children listening to music on their iPods, (minis, shuffles and nanos BTW) there was also music being listened to on Sony PSPs and on mobile phones. Bluetooth games were getting stuck into by some kids on their phones and the usual Sony PSP, Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance were present.

And then a child came and introduced me to their pet puppy labrador, all of a sudden loads of kids were telling me they had brought their dogs in! But to be honest they are pretty good to have around when on the ol’ Nintendo DS!! The little cyberpets were a lot of fun and the kids really enjoyed looking after them some of the children even had a whole pack of dogs - 3 or 4 they were looking after- it just seems like an extension of the Tamagotchis to me. Great for simulations and recently a colleague of mine when talking about the new curriculum said it would be good to compare what it is like to look after a real pet and a cyber version.

But dogs apart there was another mini-revelation as one of the kids showed me their DS. I realised that there was a little wireless chat room going off between all of the Nintendo hand helds. So I chipped in and I had kids replying from the other Year 6 class down the corridor and from the Year 3 class next door!

I thought this was a lot of fun and we had a lovely day - with pizza and a disco in the afternoon. It just makes me believe even more in the fact that our curriculum doesn’t harness our children’s everyday techology skills and perhaps there should be a place in school for all of the above.

Merry Christmas

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One Response to “School’s Out! - Merry Christmas”

# ICT in my Classroom » This sums it up…on 30 Dec 2006 at 1:32 pm

[...] I have been wondering for a long time now about how out of date our schools are becoming - this is only confounded by times in my classroom when this question (or statement) has come sharply into focus, like here. [...]