Last week teachers from across our network of schools visited our office for the first 4D Exchange. These termly events are designed so those working in our immersive spaces can share teaching ideas and best practices with each other. It’s also a chance to share exciting bits of content or themes practitioners may have developed.
Our teaching and learning associate, Gav, lead the event but once our guests got talking, everybody wanted to share ideas and suggest clever ways of using the immersive space.
One great idea that came from Hebden Green School was to turn their interactive floor into a giant board game by taking their own photo of the game and quickly uploading to their 4D create software. For a game of Cluedo they then projected a spooky mansion onto the back wall – this has been used for a variety of lessons including Maths and English.
Crescent Primary also shared with us how they were using the interactive floor theme of the human heart. A dance teacher had been using the theme to teach science by getting young people to take the roles of parts of the heart and white or red blood cells. The pupils then moved around the image of the heart reacting to different stimulus’s on the body. An ingenious and memorable way to teach science to primary school pupils!
Once all the sharing had taken place, Gav then took the practitioners through some top tips on sourcing and developing content. Any attendees should keep an eye out for the accompanying handouts and videos which we are sending out to you very soon with all the tips from the event. Following our ‘Creative Champions’ session, our development manager Nick ran a ‘Tech Champions’ workshop. This is to give more technically minded staff members additional knowledge on how their immersive space works. The aim being that our tech champs can then suggest best practice in their school and also troubleshoot any issues alongside our maintenance engineers.
We’ve already heard from one attendee at the tech champion session who quickly solved a basic problem with renewed confidence and understanding.
Our next 4D Exchange is taking place on 27th February 2013 at Orford Park in Warrington. This event is a must for all teachers working in one of our immersive spaces. Some topics for this event will be decided by issues brought up in the last 4D exchange. There will also be lots of opportunity to share and learn with fellow practitioners. We are also looking into live streaming the event so those unable to attend can still get involved. To register interest in future events please send us an email to hello@4dcreative.co.uk.