Have attended some great sessions at the festival this year.  There seems to be a select group of people cropping up all singing from the same songsheet, one which i’d love a copy of!

Session 1 was fantastic – using Sony PSPs in the classroom. The session was co-led by Tessa Watson and Alicia MacFarlane.

The most intriguing part of this was the use of a PSP as a multi-functional device.  Camera, video, mic, web browser, plus gamer.  This makes it a good alternative to having many separate devices.  A quality wireless connection is obviously needed.  Even without internet access, the functionality and capability with recording video and sound make the PSP an interesting resource.  I know you can record on most digital cameras but with this you then have the gaming function too.

Session 2 was thinking out of the xbox.  EdCompBlog posted live from there!  The session was very engaging and full of great ideas.  There was reinforcement of things I am already doing and using plus a few suggestions and ideas.  Ewan is a very easy to listen to speaker.  He also helpfully posts all his info on his blog, in case the note taking is a bit slow…

Myst III Exile and Tim Rylands featured heavily, again.  Am still trying to work out how to use that in class.  I can see that the game is really visually stimulating, with great descriptions to talk about, but do you write a story or just gain experience in writing quality description of certain scenes?

visuwords (which I’ve used before) and wordle (which stewart cutler has used) look like easy enough tools to use and easy to incorporate into learning also…