3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.

The free trial creature creator that we will be looking at allows you to create creatures, take snap shots of them and make videos of them to see how they move. Here's an example of a video I created to get students interested. I added the captions and text using i-Movie though you could just as easily use a free online video editor such as Video Toolbox or Windows Moviemaker if you are using a PC.



The creatures are very easy to create, you just drag and drop different features onto a body and the add colour and test them out to see how they move. These are some of the other creatures I created.




Once you have created your creatures you can either make videos of them, take snapshots, which you can either save or email to someone, or create an animated gif of your creature (I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the animated gifs)

Here' a tutorial showing you how it's done.



You can download a .mov version of the tutorial here or this pdf document has the main screen shots and instructions if you'd prefer to follow on paper.

You can download the Creature Creator from the Cnet website here. It's a big download (205MB), but once you have it, you don't need to have web access to do any of the tasks or create the movies and snapshots.

How do we use this with students?

• Create images of different creatures and get the students to create a story about them.
• Get the students to create descriptions of different creatures - This could include appearance, but also likes and dislikes, habits etc.
• Get students to match pictures to descriptions.
• Get students to create a creature based around your description.
• Create a creature and use a picture of it as a picture dictation with one student describing the picture while the other one recreates the creature using the software.
• Get students to create a short video of their creature and add a description and narrative below it as a video project.
  
• Ask students to create a creature suitable for a particular environment, or types of tasks, then get students to discuss which they think would be best adapted for the environment.
• Get the students to write instructions for how to create a creature.
• Use the creatures to demonstrate present continuous tenses ( sitting, running etc.)
  

What I like about it.

• It looks great on a data projector and if you work in a single computer classroom, you can get students up and dragging things around and creating in front of the class.
• The creatures are very colourful and in the environment mode they really start to take on character.
• You can use the tool to create versatile and stimulating materials.
• It's free and pretty easy to use once you get it installed.
• I like the integration with YouTube as it makes it very easy to get your videos online quite quickly.
• I like that they can produce a range of gestures and expressions.
  

What I'm not so sure about.

• It's a big download and will need to be installed on any computer it is used on, so if you want to use it in your school computer room, you'll need the help of a supportive IT manager to get it downloaded and installed on all the computers.
• The Gifs it creates aren't that good, but you don't really need to use them.
• You need a fairly good computer with a good graphics card for it to work well.

I hope you enjoy trying some of these ideas with your students.

Related links:

• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game
• Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG
• Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with
  

Best

Nik Peachey

Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak

I discovered Urtak a couple of weeks ago and took an instant liking to it. Urtak is a web based social polling application that enables you to very quickly and easily create online polls and questionnaires.
The only thing you require to get started is an email address to register as it is completely free. Here’s a short tutorial showing how it’s done.

• Watch or download a higher quality video: Urtak tutorial

The polls it creates are pretty simple. You just type in 'Yes , No' questions or statements and then click enter, give your poll a title and instructions and click on done. It seems like you can have as many questions as you like. The longest one I created had 45. Here are a couple that I created. Feel free to try them out and answer the questions to see how they work. You'll also be able to see the results.

• Teachers' digital skills tick list
• Teaching Kids with Computers
• Politics in the classroom

Once your poll is complete you can either link to it via the URL or embed it into a web page.

Once the poll is live anyone who sees the poll can answer it without having to log in or register. Viewers can even add additional questions or statements to the poll if they do register though.

What I like about it.

• Once users vote they can compare their answers to other people who have used the poll.
• The poll gives a feed out of information on the right and you can even cross tabulate answers to different questions.
• It’s great that other people can add questions to the poll.
• I like that it doesn’t give the ‘correct’ answer but shows most popular answers. This is good to keep students thinking and questioning themselves.
• If you don’t like the questions that people add to your poll you can easily get rid of them.
• You can embed the poll into other web based materials.
  
• It’s free and really quick and easy to use.

How can we use this with students?

• We can use it for class / online surveys and get students to analyse and write up the results.
• We can use it for action research to find out what things we do in class students enjoy or understand or just to get general feedback.
• We can use it to test comprehension by creating question or statements about an online text.
• We can set web research tasks for students by asking questions and getting them to search the web to find answers or find out if statements are true.
• We can use it to create progress tests to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.
  
• We can use it to create debate and explore attitudes by giving students the poll before they come in to class to get them thinking around topics to discuss in class. We could also follow this up with a post class poll to see if opinions have changed at all.
• We could use it for needs analysis to see what students feel they need to study in class.
• We can use it to get students to self assess their progress.
• We can get students to create their own reading tasks by getting them to produce questions in a poll based around an online text, then they can answer each other’s questions.(Great to use with Mashpedia)
  
• We can get students to practice Yes No questions forms and create questionnaires to find out more about their class mates.
  

What I’m not so sure about.

• At present any poll you create is added to the Urtak directory, so it would be nice to have private URLs to ensure only your students answered the questions.
• It might also be handy to be able to disable the option to have other people add questions to your polls as you can’t be sure that what they add will be relevant etc.
• If students go to the directory of all polls they might find some unsuitable and potentially offensive ones.

On the whole though I think Urtak is a great free tool and one that I will continue to use. It’ helped me to make designing web based materials a bit more interactive and also enabled me to quickly and easily do research that I can share and use to inform training and workshop presentations.

I hope you find it useful too.

Related links:

• Create Authentic Web Based Research Tasks With Mashpedia
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Education for the Global Economy

Best

Nik Peachey

Saori Hara Mixed Japan Sod Star

Saori Hara Profile and Biography
Name: Saori Hara, 原紗央莉 はら　さおり
DOB: January 1, 1988
Bith: Hiroshima, Japan
Height: 165cm
Measurements: B85/W61/H85 (E-Cup)
Hobbies: Yoga, Games, Dance

Aboug Saori Hara
Saori Hara (原紗央莉 / HARA Saori) is a Japanese gravure idol, singer, and AV actress. She was born on January 1, 1988 in Hiroshima Prefecture.

Saori Hara don't need a long time to make her as one of the best actress in 2009. Together with her senior like Rio (Tina Yuzuki), Akiho Yoshizawa, Yuma Asami, Elly Akira (aka Yuka Osawa), Kaho Kasumi, Hitomi, Risa Tsukino, Honami Takasaka, Rin Sakuragi, Kirara Asuka, Saori Hara was included in Best actress 2009 awards.

There has been a lot of buzz on the Internet recently about SOD’s new star, Saori Hara (原紗央莉). The soon to be 21 year old (born 1988, January 1st) will be making her debut with a new release from SOD on January 22nd. This beauty from Hiroshima is a quarter German (Grandfather was German). Saori first appeared in the entertainment scene in 2005 when she released a couple image videos and photo book. She was known as Mai Nanami (七海まい) at the time. She disappeared for a couple years and resurfaced in 2008 using the name Saori Hara. She released another image video called Clear Water. She finally posed nude for Sabra in November, which is when it was announced she will be working for SOD.

SOD seems pretty high on Soari Hara. She is already listed as one of their stars on the SOD Stars website. SOD has a huge banner near the 109 building in Shibuya, Tokyo, for their STOP STD campaign (pictured, see the full sized version at i rub your brog). They’ve featured past stars like Nana Natsume on it before, but now they’re featuring Saori. I have a feeling her debut DVD is going to sell a lot of copies. SOD has a special page to promote her debut which you can find here: SOD’s special Saori Hara page

If anything, this seems to be the year of Saori Hara. This girl came out of relatively nowhere to have an unprecedented rise to stardom. SOD pumped tons of marketing into this girl, and it paid off with an insane amount of buzz and record breaking sales. The quarter-German brown eyed beauty captured our attention with her unique, voluptuous looks. She certainly has a following among her fans. Our first ever post on Saori Hara was by far the most viewed post of the year, and our review of her beach video was the third most viewed post. She has been shockingly open about her personal life and feelings on her blog, and she has even revealed her real name in a recent autobiography. DMM lists 21 DVDs featuring Saori Hara in 2009, including compilations.

Miku Ohashi Young Face Jav Idol

Miku Ohashi is the new actress idol from Japan, Miku Ohashi made her debut with Kawaii studios in year 2007, and the most recently while this is written, she is working as an exclusive idol actress with Mooodyz studio. With a young face and a voluptuous figure that turns heads, this super cutie looks absolutely charming especial in school uniforms.

Miku Ohashi lives up to the title of this piece with her blend of sexiness and eagerness, combined with a fine body and her unmatched ability to pleasure a guy

As a new favourite idol, Miku Ohasi also ranked for Top JAV Actress Ranking for October 2009.

Miku Ohashi Profile :

Name: Miku Ohashi (大橋未久)
Date of birth: 1987-12-24
Place of birth: Tokyo, Japan
Height/Weight: 158 cm/ – kg
Measures: 86 – 58 – 85 cm
Hobbies: Badminton
Active since: 2007
Diary: Miku Ohashi Blog