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PSP to be used in schools
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 3rd April 2007
The PSP - soon to be boring students nationwide?
Intended to help students learn French, history and geography, the scheme is being tested out at Holyhead Secondary School, Birmingham. Staff and faculty members there have recently returned from a two week training course on the PSP where they have learnt to harness the multimedia capabilities of the gaming platform, which cost £150 each.
Staff members at the school have embraced the idea with one teacher going on to say that "The console is just like a minicomputer but fast and you can use it to tailor-make lessons for pupils who need support or stretching.
"Some people think it is an exclusively a gaming machine and don't realise all the things it can do. It can access the Internet and process information.”
The school has recently applied for government funding in order to raise the £4,500 needed to purchase 30 units for the classroom.
We have to admit that the PSP seems like an odd choice to us. After all, a Pocket PC would provide the same interaction with better support and a Nintendo DS would give students a more involving experience via the microphone and touch-screen interface as well as clocking up at £1,500 cheaper on bulk.
Don't want your kids using the PSP in the classroom? Think the money could be better spent elsewhere? Have any opinion at all?Drop by the forum and let us know
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Comments (35)
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PSP does seems an odd choice but I suppose it does have a nice screen. surely the touch screen input method on the DS might have been more useful?
I wonder if that school is funded by Sony? :p
btw the "drop by the forum and let us know" link goes to the main forum page and not this thread
I can see all the kids sat at the back of the class room bringing in their games from home and having a bit of a multiplayer session while the teacher isn't looking.
A tablet PC would be so much more practical. Central management is easy, locked down interfaces are simple, their largeness creates a better digital workspace and makes them harder to steal and being PCs they have a massive software base.
As for PSPs for the classroom?
I can see were they are coming from, it is more powerful AFAIK than Palms or D the DS, but is that extra power actually going to be used?
On topic: I agree that they'd be easy to steal from the school, though the thing that amazes me most about all this is that it took the staff two weeks to learn to use a PSP. I'd take that as a great reason not to use them in school - if you're going to take that amount of time to learn a system then why not learn to use something open source so you can do more with it? Eh?
Like this.
Ps: w00t! Second post! And thank you to those who've been saying hello.
A tablet or pocketpc would be so much better.
Or, maybe a good teacher? Electronic solutions to teaching are shite; they always have been and they probably will be for a long time.
A pocket pc, DS, tablet pc, normal pc with linux...... etc.... would be a lot better.
I think its another misguided attempt to use the in technology to aid learning.
Or maybe the teachers can attach cameras and record the physical and verbal abuse they now suffer.
Is getting PSP's in to schools really where the effort should be focussed? It is not as if the user interface is widely used in industry is it?
Are there not more fundamental problems in education to be solved that Sony's little brick are hardly likely to address and IT money could be far better spent giving the kids something that prepares them for a life outside of school?
Why the heck do they need consoles/PDAs anyway?
But this idea is just a stupid waste of money, and I'm sure there's some idiot at Sony behind it. FFS, let's just fire all the teachers and use the savings and buy more PSPs with them...
Ahh I remember them, spelling words incorrectly so the tomato man would explode, those were the days.
EDIT: Is there a competition going on or something on who can waste the most tax payer money?
EDIT: its not a late April fool's day joke is it?
Considering in my computing class when we have to do theory people just play with their pc's i cant imagine what they will do with a psp. Thats why they have moved all the pc's to the side of the classroom. Ridicule!
Dumb - DS would be better by miles, pocketpc/tablet/etc is more expensive but more suited easily.
Not a shock that the dumbarse mail is getting involved since they tend to be the most clueless (and bigoted, stupid, reactionary, etc) newspaper around.
Put a working smart board and projector in each class room and give the teachers a working laptop each.
Letting kids run wild on portable (can be turned away from the teacher so they can't see the screen, easily stolen, easily hidden), small screened, slow, non specialised computers is completely useless.
CC
And considering 8 years ago when i moved to this area the new high school was supposed to be built and it still isnt. There just wasting money plain and simple.
Unless a pupil has taken tech Studies, computing or some other subject that DIRECTLY involves technology it shouldnt be in the classroom. Yes its fine for writing essays and what not but not for "improving" learning. For god sakes people complain in my history class if they have to write a note a paragraph long! In 5 years they will just stop teaching kids to write...
She uses it one hell of a lot as she's a more techie teacher, gets the kids playing games on the whiteboard to learn and so on.
"Sir/Miss Can we play a game!"
The answer is always
"Only if you behave!"
And then usually it wil follow with
"Yer well gay!"
Oh joy.
We had TWO!!!!!
..for the whole school.
Also i think that schools should move from using bloody dells. There horrible!