Thunder

Last week while I was in Staffordshire I was chatting to a couple of the delegates about gaming, as you do on a game design course. Tim from Ounsdale School mentioned that he had been playing on ‘Frets on Fire‘, this is an open source (FREE) version of Guitar Hero for the pc or mac. I have since downloaded it, it is very addictive and great fun, I would recommend it to everyone. I have passed the details on to Keith the Shropshire music advisor and we will see what he makes of it.

I have spent today in Staffordshire working with eight ICT teachers from across the county. The Staffordshire ICT consultant has accessed some funding for a study support project, the aim of the project is to participate in a Gaming Competition (details here). I was asked to deliver software training on Game Maker, the software to be used for the project. The project will conclude on the 4th December with the students coming to the training centre to present their games to the other students.

I have set up a blog that will be used to share ideas and work in progress throughout the project, the teachers have posted their initial plans for the project already. What was interesting is that the teachers were discussing how they will be using Game Maker in other contexts outside of the project, replacing Flowol with Game Maker was high on the agenda, iMedia was mentioned by several teachers, and using it from year 7 right up into the sixth form.

My ibook’s have gone mobile and have landed at Barrow CE Primary school, the pupils are busy playing around with Comic Life.  You can check out pupils progress on the school blog.

Being a very lucky boy, great dad and super husband I was lucky enough that my family bought me (at great distress) a Nintendo Wii for my birthday last week. What a great bit of kit the Wii is, for playing ‘proper’ games I still prefer my XBox 360 but what fun playing on the Wii is, and Jack my 3 year old can even have a go. The Wii has also awoken Steph’s competitive side and we are having so much fun.

Anyway to the point of my post, tennis is probably our favourite game - and I have lots of photos of Steph playing (give me an email if you want to see one). While playing tennis we have to move all the furniture back to allow us plenty of space. Unfortunately there isn’t much skill to my game I just whack it and hope it stays in, this being the case I decided to do some research to see if anyone can help me out. There are loads of websites out there but this has got to be my favourite - How to win Wii Tennis (at any cost)

If anyone knows of any good sites that provide useful tips for getting my ball to go back straight over the net and not cross court all the time please leave it in the comment section below Thanks

Search the Earth for giant toys.

Hello boys and girls. Ready to find some toys? Santa has hidden a treasure trove of presents somewhere in Google Earth (actually, it was a few of his elves, but you get the idea) . Every day from December 12th until Christmas Eve, a clue will appear outside Santa’s North Pole workshop which, if you can solve it, will lead you to a toy hidden in a Google Earth satellite image. And every day, the location of the previous day’s toy will be revealed.

Visit http://earth.google.com/santa/ to start your hunt.

Talkman is a microphone and software application for the PSP, it allows you to speak into your PSP and translate simple phrases into 6 different languages.

It would be interesting to see if/how this could be used in the MFL classroom, Ewan & Joe??

Russell is on a roll, his latest demonstration was ‘KIT - Kinesthetic Interactive Teaching System‘ was really inspiring - he had 30 members of the audience playing a mulitplayer game with him.  The system costs £3000 but has a great amount of flexibility, you can use the games that come with the system or create, better still get your pupils to create, games for it.  The system can also play music - so no need to hire a dj for the school disco again, it also can be used as a karaoke system

I would really like to get hold of one of these systems.

At the last Shropshire Advisory Service day I did a short demonstration of my blog and to show my readership I clicked on the clustrmap and then struggled to name some of the countries my readers come from.

Last week I was reading a post on the TecnoTeach blog entitled ‘Where did you say you were from?‘ the teacher appears to share my lack of geographical knowledge.

…. asking the children to start naming new locations as they appear on the map. Making this a game with the possibility of winning school house points has opened up a new curricular area in our blog that was not intentional. The children are now looking at the map, with interest, and locating marked areas as they have a desire to find out who their world wide audience are.

If you have a school blog, go and create a clustrmap now to develop your pupils’, and possibly your own, mapping skills.

This is a great idea and I wholesomely agree, put a clustrmap on your blog - not to record the number of hits your blog gets but where people are coming through.  You could produce a huge world map on your classroom wall and insert pins in it when you get a visit from a new geographical region.

Fed up with using Google all the time for your websearches, well why not try out Ms Dewey for a new approach to searching.

Teachmeet was a great success – I was able to put a lot more faces to names I have read over the past year. The informalness (I don’t think that is a word) of the event was definitely a major plus, at times several of us were sat on the floor, similar to pupils in primary schools ☺ The only problem with these events is that you pick up so many great ideas and there aren’t enough hours in the day to investigate them all.

I would personally like to thank the speakers: Theo, David, Ollie, Chris, John, Kate & Sean, it was a shame we didn’t have anymore time to listen to anyone else.

A big thanks most go to both Stormhoek for supplying the wine and Promethean for paying the exorbitant corkage charges charged by the Crowne Plaza, and also for Ewan for doing the bulk of the organisation.

The meal at the Goat was a great success and I eventually got to meet Mrs Mc (Morgane).

I hope I get an invite up to SETT again next year so I can meet you all again and gain from your wealth of experience and creativity.

PS Ewan, we need to get a photo of you in your t-shirt.