Last year I was lucky enough to see Tim Rylands at an ICT conference. His presentation was after lunch, normally a time for us to have a nap. Mr Walker captivated our attention straight away and I knew that we were in for an eventful afternoon. He whizzed through many ICT resources we could use with the children such as The Hat, creating a multimodal presentation and Myst III Exile. The landscapes were spectacular and his dialogue with such a huge audience, made me feel like a pupil again.
January 09 was an invaluable opportunity to see Tim in action teaching 60 children in 3 different sessions. I was amazed how focused the children were and the fantastic work that was created in such a short space of time.
Each year group in my school has integrated Myst III into their English curriculum. The creative buzz is quite infectious and I hope that it continues. I have only used the opening scene from Myst III to see what I could get out of the children in one session. The language and descriptive phrases that they came up with were fantastic. Our current topic is Explanatory and Persuasive texts, I have a few ideas how to use Myst to inspire the children. Watch this space to find out how it goes.
Well our first week of Myst has been fantastic. The children couldn’t wait to explore J’nanin and describe the route along the beach to the garden house. They are now working on drawing plans of what they think the garden house looks like inside, the challenge is to imagine what it would be like as a holiday cottage. I will post up pictures when they have finished. I am very impressed with the work they have done so far.
Check out the children’s work in the mixbook below.
Below is useful link to various saved game files for throughout Myst III Exile. Useful if you just want to jump to specific spots.
So here is an update about what we have done so far with Myst. My year group partner and I decided to use Myst to inspire the children’s writing during the topic of Myths and Legends. I must say Myst helped the children to describe in fantastic detail the setting of their Myth.
The progress the children have made in their writing really shone through, when we carried out our writing assessment before Easter. We showed the children each world, giving them ample time to make notes about the contrasting settings. The challenge for the children was to take these notes and write a persuasive text as though Myst was a theme park. The children rose to the challenge and have some work to be proud of.
So how has using Myst impacted on writing?
Myst gave the children a chance to produce work in a range of genres and to encourage them to be share their imagination more. As teachers, sometimes we need to provide the children with more freedom to be creative. Children do respond more favourably to activities that give them more ownership. For example, I set my class the challenge of showing me what the interior of the Greenhouse looked like on J’nanin. The only input I gave was that, it should be equipped like a holiday cottage. I was astounded by what the children produced.
In July, at the Kent ICT conference, I was privileged to be asked to present the work my school had produced. Much of the work the children had been produced was done without the use of ICT.
As a school we have already decided which year groups will use Myst III, Myst IV Revelation and Myst V End of Ages.
I have already started exploring Myst IV with the help of a walkthrough. Can’t wait to use it with the children.
