Monday, March 10, 2008

Learning on the Wii

I've finally got round to buying some points and downloading Opera on my Wii. I'm excited by quite a few possibilities in its use for education, especially since some colleges I know have bought them to support learners in their Entry Level courses for the Learning for Living and Work projects.
First off, I had to work out how to scroll as there was no scroll bar down the right side of the screen. You simply press the direction buttons on the handset or press the B button (that's like the trigger button on the handset) and drag it to whever you want. Simple!
Entering information and web addresses were a little time consuming with the onscreen keyboard. Learners who are good at texting on their phones may find the alpha-numeric keypad more familiar and quicker than the qwerty keyboard. Luckily, you can save favourites to save you time.
I was able to read my web pages that were based on RSS feeds, but was not able to playback music or watch any videos. :-(
However, there's a brilliant website http://www.wiiplayable.com/ where you can play more Wii games online. There are word games, puzzle games, sports games as well as the usual shooters etc. There's Deal or No Deal, Paint blocks, a simple Paint programme and lots of others to explore. I've also been on http://www.Lego.com and tried out the drag and drop puzzles and other games on there. Good for engaging construction students perhaps?
Moodle looks ok on the Wii, plus you can zoom in and out of the web site using the plus and minus buttons on the handset. You can't open any Microsoft documents or pdfs, but you can read the forums and view any web links.
Anyway, I've already missed lunch from being too much of a geek with the Wii. I'm sure the electrician in the house thinks I'm just playing. He doesn't realise that this is all hard work! Now I'm off to play that Plumber game I spotted on wiiplayable...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can watch videos on the wii - depending on the format. I regularly use youtube on my wii, as well as other embedded media.

Heather said...

Some interesting stuff is being done by a chap called Johnny Chung Lee - see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/