Thunder

Following on from this post on the Official Linden blog I decided to check out Veodia, Veodia allows you to broadcast high quality live video to sites, blogs and mobile phones (and to Second Life).

I set up a tv on wmnet island ready for my broadcast and popped back to Veodia to start it up, once the broadcast was rolling I copied the url onto the television and I was away..

There you have it Tarannau Wollongong watching me.

This has tremendous potential for running cpd for staff and students, as far as the Shropshire Teen Island and the diploma I see huge potential for using this technology to get high quality speakers from industry to talk to our students.  I will certainly try to deliver part of my next ICT subject leader course using this technology within Second Life.  I am also thinking that I will broadcast our Create IT awards (April 14th 2008) via Veodia in Second Life.

Last night in Second Life following a link from a secondlife education mailing list I popped over to LeedsMet island (slurl.com/secondlife/LeedsMet/105/108/22/). What an interesting place it is, but what was more interesting was chatting to Cubist Scarborough and trying out some of his free objects for use within Second Life.

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As I mentioned in my previous email the guys at Animoto respond rapidly to any feedback, one of my questions to them was how I could publish the video in a wordpress blog as it didn’t appear to be supported by the site.  Within 30mins I received an email from Nate:

As for word press, they don’t trust us as a media provider just yet.  Vodpod has created a embed tool that has helped our users post to their blogs ( vodpod.com/wordpress <http://vodpod.com/wordpress>).  That should help you get this posted.

As you have probably guessed he was right, the firefox extension did the trick - cheers Nate.

I started writing this post a long time ago and haven’t got around to completing it, so here is the first instalment and if there is any interest I will write some more.

It is strange that despite one of my main passions being for the use of computer games in education that I have not written a post about it on my blog. I have plenty of conversations with people about what I believe and what I have done, but for some reason I have never put anything onto the blog. So this will be my first posting in a series of postings about why I believe in the use of computer games in education, the examples I give are all ones that I have been involved in while teaching or now as a consultant.

I have always enjoyed playing computer games since I was a kid, I had a spectrum as a young lad and spent ages typing in computer games only for them to fail to load - those books were awful, but I learnt a lot about logic and sequencing of instructions (soon to be a new part of the national curriculum for ICT). I played games for hours on end, always trying to find the most efficient way of winning. Winning was part of my nature as I was also a keen sportsman playing rugby, football, cricket and crown green bowls - so I did have a healthy life I wasn’t just stuck in front of the computer screen for hours on end.

While at university I got introduced to LPMud games, in particular DeeperTrouble MUD. This is basically a multi user text based adventure game, that is played across the internet which I accessed via a simple telnet connection! Towards the end of my university days I had finally made my way through all the levels of the game and was promoted to ‘wizard’ status that enabled me to write the game not just play it. What I did notice while playing the game was that my spelling and typing speed increased dramatically, I will come back to that later on.

So I left university and got a job as a maths teacher, after several years and gaining ICT lessons year on year I left my first job to become head of ICT. This gave me the opportunity to push the boundaries as it was my head that was on the chopping block. I used to stay behind after school and oversee computer clubs and at the same time I played on Deeper Trouble, either coding new areas or just playing. Bearing in mind that the screens are just full of text, several students were keen to give it a go. After realising that telnet was very limited I purchased 3 licences for zmud, this provided a much slicker interface to the game.

I showed the 3 students how to log in to Deeper Trouble and talked them through the initial decisions they had to make, race, gender etc. It was obvious from the beginning that their spelling was going to be a problem and their 1 finger typing was also going to give them some problems, but that didn’t stop us.

Half term is great, it allows me some time to play. The latest web based application I have played with is Animoto, animoto allows you to create a 30sec video for FREE, if you want it longer than 30secs then you have to part with some cash. Animoto allows you to upload photos to the site, or it will grab them from common web based picture sites i.e. flickr, once you have your photos you can put them into the order you require and select which you want to spotlight. The next stage of the process is to add your music, again you can upload your own music (bear in mind copyright etc etc) or use a track from the site itself. Animoto then renders and produces your music video.

You can then email your friends of post it online, it looks like there will be the ability to download it and export to ipods etc in the near future. As with most applications like this it is in ‘beta’ but the guys respond really quickly to any feedback.

Here is my first example.

After just over a year of hearing Derek and Ewan talk about using the Nintendo DS to support learning, and after asking the LA to purchase me one only to be turned down, I decided to part with my hard earned cash and bought a silver Nintendo DS Lite.

For £105 I managed to get the DS and More Brain Training, my first brain test set my age at 29 - not bad for a 35 year old. The question is should I also purchase the 1st brain training game, or are they too similar? What other games would people recommend for educational purchases?

Update: I have just found out that my GameBoy Advance games will work on the DS - bonus!

Terry Freedman is carrying out a survey of pupil use of Social Networks, if you have some time can you try and get your pupils to complete his survey.

I found the following video on YouTube, this would make an excellent starter for Power Point training:

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Firaxis Games Educators’ Exchange  in the Community section of our company website. It’s the first online gathering place for the growing international community of progressive educators who have embraced video games as effective teaching tools in the classroom.

For years we’ve heard from teachers all over the world who have found great success in using Firaxis titles like Sid Meier’s Civilization, Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Sid Meier’s Railroads! in classrooms to teach a variety of subjects ranging from history to economics to communication. Although we create games purely for entertainment purposes, we’re thrilled with the organic migration of our games into the classroom. We want to support that movement by offering educator’s a place online where they can gather to get information, exchange ideas via our Educators’ Forum and hear from folks who have integrated games into their daily teaching. And not just our games…feel free to talk about any games you like!

Please click here  to join the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.

At the latest ‘West Midlands ICT Consultant Network Meeting’ Steve from Worcestershire showed me ‘Snippy‘.

What is Snippy?

How often have you carefully selected some text from a Web page and copied it to an email message? Snippy makes this a snap! Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — that’s it, you’re done! The cut-out image will now be in your clipboard, and you can paste it in another application.

If you are cutting out a portion of an Internet Explorer window, the URL will also be copied to the clipboard; this makes it very convenient to select something interesting on a Web site and send it out in an email message.

Unfortunately Snippy only works on Windows so I haven’t had a proper play with it, but from what Steve showed me it seems an excellent utility for Windows users.  Steve commented that the file size of the image is a lot smaller than that of an equivalent image using ‘Print Screen’.