Ewan McIntosh is a Teacher and Social Media Specialist who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He speaks internationally leading student and teacher workshops and conferences.
As a new technologies research practitioner he has been involved with integrating blogging, podcasting, wikis gaming and other emerging technologies into classroom life from nursery to secondary within the East Lothian Council district of Scotland.
Ewan delivered the keynote speech at the Ulearn conference. The conference focused on integrating new technologies to empower learning and transform leadership in education.
Ewan recognises the power of play in learning. Ludic learning can happen in secondary science but students do a huge amount of unsupervised and unrecognised learning as they play computer games and access social networking sites such as Bebo and Facebook. He has recognised their potential in the classroom. In workshops he has discovered the effectiveness of games in expanding student horizons and imaginations when they are speaking and writing creatively or transactionally.
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He highlighted the example of Tim Rylands who uses the unsettling landscapes in Myth III during literacy exercises. Tim is a real performer in the classroom although his academic rigour while playing games is evident. He apparently uses a walking stick that he doesn’t require as a prop. It magically turns into a flute! Look at the engagement of his students.
He asks students to describe the rocks in the landscape at one point. Perhaps we need to rethink literacy issues in school and be less reliant on the book paradigm in science