Cutting and pasting with the Wii

Two blog posts in one day! Blimey!

I decided to try out my idea of using cut and paste on the Wii (instead of doing some proper work) and here's the video of my result.

Some of the features I really like about this is the way you can zoom out to see all the photos on your SD card. You will see me choosing the Road Signs picture on the Wii, then cutting the text from the right and pasting it under the correct picture on the left.

Because it's more like a 'copy' than a 'cut', you could do one to many labelling exercises (around input and output devices, for example).

I love the fact that you can make the 'pasted' image bigger or smaller by moving the Wiimote closer to the screen or further away from the screen, so you are using 3-dimensional movement to control the final 'stamp'. What a blast!

Enjoy! (by the way, images are Crown copyright, taken from direct.gov.uk)

Using the Wii for educational purposes

Here are some reasons for using the Wii for educational purposes that I have witnessed in various colleges:

1. The games encourage hand-eye coordination

2. The learners enjoy the interactivity and for under £200 compared to a £3000 Smartboard, it buys a lot of engagement.

3. The games can allow people with disabilities to join in an activity that would not be easy to do in real life: bowling, playing tennis, fishing etc.

4. Learners enjoy creating their own Miis, characters that represent them, and creating Miis for their tutors. A discussion around physical attributes could happen here - face shape etc

5. Take pictures and videos with your SD-card camera, pop them into the Wii and you can draw on top of the photos (pointing out Health and Safety hazards for example), run slide shows, create jigsaws from your own photos. Thanks to Josephy Priestley College for these ideas. One more from me: copy areas and paste them (cut out words from the bottom of a picture and paste them in the right areas to label parts, for instance?)

6. Get on the Internet with the Wii (see my other blog posts about using the Wii) and never have to buy another game! Try the word games, puzzle games, shape or colour matching games, painting programme etc. This is my current favourite logic game that will get your learners' goat (as it were): http://wiiplayable.com/playgame.php?gameid=246

7. Browse web sites using Opera (you have to buy this for the Wii) for a whole new experience.

8. I know Hull College have bought a racing game and a 'steering wheel' for their Foundation Tracks motor vehicle students and it helps them to understand manual versus automatic transmission a lot better as they can witness the difference for themselves.

Got any more good examples or ideas? Send them to me and I'll collate them and put in a post to ILT Champs one of these days, or maybe add to Dave Foord's wiki on ILT...

USB headphones and mic

I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra which is a nice ultra-portable PC. However, it does not have mic input and relies on the built-in mic, which records too much surrounding noise to be effective. 

Having used Dave Foord's USB headphones and mic at the RSC YH summer conference (and suffering the Princess Leia effect), I thought I'd buy some for myself. A little bit of research later, I bought these from Kenable.co.uk:

So they're only cheap (£4.99 incl VAT), but they are space saving, and the brilliant thing about it for colleges is that you can attach your own headphones to it!

So, if your PCs still have the audio and mic inputs at the back of the PC, or you just don't fancy sharing ear wax with other people, why not get some of these and get your students doing more voice recordings/podcasting?

I would highly recommend asking students to use Voicethread.com as a great alternative to PowerPoint presentations. Good for group work, encourages recording of voice or webcam comments on slides or videos and can be easily reviewed by the rest of the class immediately after the lesson.

I'm hoping to use it with my online teaching from September! 

Channels on Jaiku

Set up a channel for the first time in Jaiku yesterday. Did this for Techdis, so if you use Jaiku and want to follow the news from Techdis, join the channel by starting a post with #techdis.

To start your own channel, you click on the channels tab at the top of the Jaiku page.

Some ideas for using channels:
Say you're a tutor and you have 3 classes that you want to use Jaiku with. Rather than having all the students as your contacts, and no way to differentiate between them, start 3 channels, say #classA, #classB, #classC. Tell your learners to get a Jaiku account and post to #classA for instance, to join that class.

On your own page, starting a post with #classA means that only the members in #classA will get notified of that post. (All your contacts will as well) A post starting #classB will only notify those who are members in #classB etc.

Maybe someone can try this feature out and let us know how they get on with it from September?

Wii on the internet - wifi and network solutions

Colleges may have a problem getting the Wii on the Internet because it only accepts WPA or WEP security.
Try http://tinyurl.com/58amla for a network connection via the LAN.

I've managed to get my Wii on the Internet using a USB wifi connector (http://tinyurl.com/5q7hvm) on my Q1 Ultra. I wanted to be able to take the Wii around to demonstrate it's capability once connected to the Internet, but wasn't able to do this easily until I bought the wifi connector.
Now my Wii will try to connect to the Internet by looking for the USB wifi connector on my Q1 Ultra! Marvellous! I'm off to play Plumber on the Wii...(http://wiiplayable.com/game.php?gameid=256)

Connecting the wii on a college network

In the last few days, I've tried to connect the Wii at Selby College and tried to connect it at Bradford University. After hours of trying and searching on the web, I've realised that for colleges to connect the Wii to the internet, they will need to purchase the Nintendo Wifi usb connector:
http://wii.nintendo.co.uk/424.html

I'm going to try it out and will report back if it works! Fingers crossed!

Veotag about Rotherham College's MoLeNET project

I filmed Bill Jones, Asst Principal of Rotherham College talking about his MoLeNET project on 3rd April 2008 when I went for my visit as a Mentor. As you can see, he's a very enthusiastic person and very supportive of using technology in the classroom and beyond. Link to video.

This video needed an airing but didn't feel varied enough as I didn't have the chance to film other people or to film cutaways. Using Veotag, however, has made the film more interesting because you can read the summary of points covered and even jump directly to a point in the film!

Of course, if we could then Voicethread it so people can leave (nice) comments, that would be even better! Someone needs to make a Veothread!

I'm not sure why my camcorder (Samsung HMX10) has given the video such a blue cast but will explore further, and remember to bring a tripod next time. Have also realised (too late) that I cannot set it to 4:3 aspect ratio, so this will have to be done post-production or left as it is, in the hope that people start viewing their web pages on their nice widescreen teles!

By the way, a lot of teles have gone widescreen. How soon before the pc screen follows?