Guest Speaker

My Year 10 English class had a guest speaker today.

Rebecca Fernandez spoke about her journey towards making a living as a game designer. Rebecca’s mother is an ex-student of our school and the boys could relate to the experiences of a local person in achieving her goals. The boys listened politely and some were very enthused and asked good questions. Often, Rebecca talked about her own learning and the necessity of ‘teaching herself’. As you may know, Year 10 named their blog The Republic (of learning how to learn) and this is a major focus of our ongoing class discourse about the nature of learning.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Darcy Moore

Rebecca’s explanation of how they crowdsourcing Convict Interactive’s latest project was also very interesting to the boys designing their own games using the Unity 3D engine. The contemporary world, live. I loved it!

Our last presenter ‘skyped’ in and this led to a range of really good discussions in class (and amongst colleagues). It is important that schools engage with the ‘outside world’ and guests like Rebecca are an invaluable source of authenticity, engagement and motivation.It makes school more real!

Here’s Rebecca’s PowerPoint journey:

[slideshare id=12060563&doc=rebeccafernandezpresentation-120319011018-phpapp01]

Do you have guest speakers enthusing and motivating your students?