From poetry to PE: how PSPs help students learn
April 2009
Kim Thomas
Teachers at The Ridings School in Halifax have every reason to be proud of their achievements. Once labelled “the worst school in the country” and put under special measures by Ofsted, at its last inspection the school achieved a grade of 2 (good), with some features ranked as ‘outstanding’.
Staff at the school (nonetheless due to close later this year) have worked hard to raise standards of achievement and to motivate students – particularly boys, some of whom struggle with literacy. One of the initiatives introduced by the management team to tackle the problem has been the purchase of a class set of Sony PlayStation Portables (PSPs).
PSPs are generally associated with game-playing, but they have multiple functions. In size and form factor, they are a cross between a mobile phone and a laptop, with screens large enough to display photographs, files and videos. They also have a simple-to-use digital video camera, an integrated MP3 player, and wireless internet connectivity. A USB port makes it easy to upload and download files.
The versatility of the devices became apparent very quickly, says Donald Cumming, an advanced skills teacher at the school. GCSE business students, and younger students carrying out enterprise activities, were soon using the devices to play Thrillville, a game in which users manage a theme park. It’s a good simulation of real-life business activity, says Donald: “You have to choose how you spend your budget, you have to work out how you’re going to advertise, you have to work out who your audience is.”
Normally, he adds, enterprise activities consist of simulating unlikely tasks, such as building a bridge as a team and then extrapolating some business principles from it. “To give them a game like Thrillville for a prolonged session, maybe two or three hours, and have a competition where students have to make the most money or be the best employer, and then have a conversation with them afterwards about what works is much more effective, they enjoy it a lot more and they learn about the world of business,” he says.
The PSPs also proved a good way of inspiring a new interest in literacy. Some Year 9 students struggled with persuasive writing, but their reluctance to write changed when the teacher gave them the task of turning their persuasive writing into an advert and filming it on the PSPs. “Straight away the level of engagement improved. They rewrote their work several times to make it more effective because they wanted to be better than the other groups, and that sort of interest has been sustained,” says Donald. In another class, students used the PSPs to make short documentaries based on World War One poetry, reading out the poems and creating images to accompany them. In each case, the films could then be shown to the whole class on the interactive whiteboard.
The history department has made extensive use of the PSPs. In one lesson, says Lyndon Gallagher, the school’s head of history, students created a simple animation of suffragist Emily Davison being trampled by the King’s horse in 1913 and turned it into a short news broadcast. But the PSPs have also been an excellent way of displaying historical source documents, such as Hogarth’s Gin Lane or the letters purporting to be from Jack the Ripper, he says: “They can zoom in and focus on different areas, and it allows them to go in and explore the picture in a lot more depth.” When he put the Ripper letters on the devices, Lyndon included a recording of himself reading the letters so students could listen to them well as look at them.
The MP3 functionality has proved particularly useful: students can record the lesson and then listen to it again, using headphones, to go over anything they don’t understand. (Lyndon plans to extend this by putting the MP3 files and PowerPoint slides on the school’s blog to help students revise at home.) The internet connectivity means that Lyndon can load weblinks for a particular project before the lesson starts, and students can then look at the websites to do their research.
There have been other occasions where the PSPs have been used instead of the interactive whiteboard to show PowerPoint slides or short video clips, such as the opening scene of the D-Day landings in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ – the advantage being that students can refer back to the slides or the clips later in the lesson.
In Leeds, too, schools in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme have been exploring the use of PSPs. Joyce Ness, an educational consultant for RM, is working with the Leeds BSF programme to help teachers find new and imaginative ways of using technology. At Allerton Grange school, the PSPs have been used in PE lessons, with students recording each other’s performance, enabling both teachers and fellow students to review their work with them, frame by frame, and offer advice about how their performance could be improved. Another school, Temple Moor, has used the PSPs in a similar way in dance lessons.
Joyce thinks the biggest success, however, has been with a group of autistic students at Allerton High School, where teacher Maggie Lindsay asked her students to create a DVD for new students starting the following term. The students approached the task with enthusiasm, using the PSPs to carry out and record interviews with teachers with confidence – something they would never have done before, says Joyce. On another occasion, one of the autistic boys took a PSP into his drama lesson. “His drama teacher was trying to get him to show different emotions. He thought he was, but he wasn’t,” says Joyce. “Once he started being filmed and seeing how he looked, he realised he didn’t look very sad, angry or happy and changed his image to suit the circumstances, which was a fantastic move forward.”
This is just the beginning. Joyce and her colleagues have plenty of plans for the PSPs, including the use of GPS attachments, which will mean that PSPs can be taken on field trips and used to access location-specific information.
It’s too early to say whether the PSPs have a measurable impact on achievement, but the signs are encouraging. As Donald says: “As a classroom practitioner, you see the impact on the students in terms of their engagement and motivation instantly when they’re being used.”