Learning Kids Games: vle

Showing posts with label vle. Show all posts

Friday, February 6, 2009

Coffee With Dennis Newson

Sunday 15th February 2009 (GMT 18.00 = 10.00 PST) sees the return of Coffee With.

This is the forth in our series of 'Coffee With ..' educational chat shows on Edunation III in Second Life, so please do come along, join our audience and meet other people interested in developing education and learning within Second Life.

In this show I'll be interviewing Dennis Newson (aka: Osnacantab Nesterov) Formerly: University of Osnabrück, Webhead and member of SLexperiments

In the show I will be talking to Dennis about his experiences of starting off his Second Life as a digital immigrant, his observations of language teaching within Second Life and his recent foray into teacher training and development.

If you would like to come along and watch the show and join in the discussion, then go along to Edunation III and click the sign-up terminals or email Gavin at: dudeney@theconsultants-e.com. The event is free, but we are limited to 100 places. The show starts at GMT = 18.00 (GMT is 8 hours ahead of Second Life time, so that's 10.00 PST and 19.00 CET)

If you don't have a Second Life avatar but would like to know how to set one up then you can download instructions from here. Setting up a Second Life avatar

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG

Wonderland looks like a great free online role playing game for younger students. The game is based around the story of some travelers who become shipwrecked and have to survive by doing various tasks, quests and challenges. The graphics look like the typical Japanese manga cartoons which are so popular with kids and teens.

What I really like about this is that the 'things to do' type quests and challenges are already there and built in so , unlike virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com you and your students don't have to think up things to do.

I think this is really good motivating game to get students using English to solve problems and work collaboratively. If you can get your students hooked on a game like this they'll do the learning for themselves.

On the negative side, they will need to download the software and that's over 500Mb, so they'll need broadband and a reasonably up to date computer. The game is also quite complex and I can't find any information regarding minimum ages for registration.

That said, if your students are keen gamers and have an intermediate level of English or higher and you want to motivate them to work on their own, this could be a wonderful tool for getting them to do that.

Best

Nik Peachey

Related postings

Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Virtual Language Learning World for Kids

Well what kid wouldn't want to be a language learning panda? Panfu has used this premise as the basis for a new virtual world for kids in which they can play games and learn languages at the same time.

They create their own panda avatar, dress the panda and have their own panda tree house to decorate and invite friends round to.

On the whole this looks pretty good and I'm sure my 9 year old daughter will be keen to try this out (she's already a Webkinz fanatic). Panfu are offering two levels of membership; Free and Gold. Gold entitles your kids to get extra customisation for their panda avatar and his lodgings.

Getting your kids involved in virtual worlds or any kind of social networking is always slightly risky, but it does look as though Panfu are taking this seriously.

The service is available in a range of languages. If your kids register as being English, then they get to learn some Spanish, if they register as other nationalities it looks like they get to learn English.

I haven't tried this one out yet myself, but it does look like a serious and well thought out educational effort. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Hope your kids enjoy it.

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?

Have Google joined the online 3D virtual world market? Well it looks like they have, but it looks like it's still pretty early days with the Beta release of Lively.

Lively certainly seems to have a lot of potential and a lot of good things going for it, in addition to having the might of a company like Google behind it.

The 3D rooms run in the browser and only require the download of a very small plugin (about half a MB) as opposed to the huge downloads that Second Life and There.com require.
Anyone can create their own room, pretty quickly and easily, and embed the room into a web page like the one below.
The rooms aren't connected so if you want to use this with students, it's less risky as they are less prone to 'wandering' into unsuitable areas.
The amount of customization of both avatars and rooms is limited at the moment, so this might well help to discourage the more 'adult' orientated users who tend to crop up in Second Life so much.
Word is that you can add and watch YouTube videos within your 3D room, which could make a nice addition to a distance course and enable your students to have film / video night together.
The 3D comic book type graphics look good and would surely appeal to teens or younger learners.
It's free at the moment at least.

Here is my 3D room embedded into my page

But this is what it should look like!

Before you get too excited though:

I've had more than a few problems getting this to work for me either in Firefox 3 or IE 7 and you can't run it on a MAC yet.
Lots of the tools for editing the room and avatar that appear in the help instructions, never seem to appear on my screen, so once I've created my room, I don't seem to be able to edit it at all.
There's no voice chat only text chat.
Because it's only just been launched the actual population is still pretty small, so actually meeting someone to talk to is a bit of a challenge

Anyway, despite all this, I think this is still one to watch, not only because it has Google behind it, but because if it can be made to work well and run in the browser with lower demand on bandwidth and small downloads, this could open up the potential of virtual worlds to many more people and that can't be a bad thing.

Some of my other postings on virtual worlds.

Best Nik Peachey Read More..