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

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey

Immersive Image Environments

If you enjoy working with images with your EFL students, especially on an IWB (interactive whiteboard) or a data projector, then PicLens is exactly what you need.

PicLens is a plugin (small program) that works within your web browser (there are versions for Firefox, Safari and IE 7) and it converts many of the standard image sharing websites, like flickr, Photobucket, Google Images, Yahoo Images etc. into "3D immersive environments"!

To understand what that mean have a look at this short flash video tutorial which shows how to use PicLens.

Click here or on the image to view the movie (5Mb Flash)
OR
Download a version of this movie for i-pod / i-tunes here

At the click of the mouse the normal 2D web pages are converted into a wall of images which you can explore and enlarge.

How to use this with ELT students on your data projector or IWB

• Pull up a wall of images and describe one while your students try to guess which one it is. Then get a student to describe an image and the others guess which one. (This will work best with quite similar images). You can then get students to do this in pairs.
  
• Type in a search term and ask students to describe the connection / relevance of the image to the term (This works best when you enter abstract nouns like politics, alienation, paranoia etc.)
• Use the resource for any new vocabulary words that come up in your lesson. Simply collect the words, type them in and find images that relate to the word. (This won't work for every word)
• Get students to compare and contrast two images (A common task in EFL exams such as FCE)
• Play just a minute and select an image for each student, they then have to talk for one minute about that image with repeating them selves or pausing (This is difficult to do, so don't expect too much) award points for the student who manages to speak for the longest.
• Put students with their back to the images, select one and the other students (in two teams or groups) have to describe the image to the student who can't see it. The student then has to guess which image they described.
• Pull up a single image and ask students to think about the photographer's intention.
  
• Why did the photographer take the image?
  
• What did they want to say?
  
• What is their relationship to the image content?
  
• What were they doing before, after they took the image?
  
• Etc etc.
• Students can select their favourite image and explain why they like it, or the one they like least.
• Students can try to use their imagination to describe the space around the image that you don't see.
  
• What's happening around the photographer that you don't see?
  
• What is the photographer wearing?
  
• What's happening behind the photographer?
• Describe the photographer (age, gender, nationality, personality etc.)
  

What I like about it

• The Plugin is free and very simple to download and install and less than 2 Mb
• The interface is really easy to use and very attractive
• It really highlights the images and frees then from the textual distraction that you often find on a web page
• There's no advertising on it
• You get access to some really fantastic images in class without having to download them or violate anyone's copyright
• The most recent version also enables you to create immersive walls of videos from YouTube !!! Fantastic!
  

What I'm not so sure about

• As with any image sharing / search bank you have to be careful with younger students that inappropriate images don't appear. You can get around this though by setting up your own account on something like Flickr and only using specific images from your account. This could be time consuming, but if you got other teachers and students to help, it could be a fantastic resource.
• If you are on a slow connection it could take a bit longer for the images to load.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it from here:

• Version for Internet Explorer 7
• Version for Safari 2 + 3.0
• Version for Firefox

This is a really great tool for the connected ELT classroom and also great to use at home. I hope you are able to enjoy using it with your students. Do drop me a lne with any other ideas and activities you use with it.

Best

Nik

Second Life Teacher Training Videos

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.


The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.

Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2.

Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want.

This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback.

I've always avoided using audio on my own blog ones as I'm a bit self-conscious about my voice and I've felt that using text makes them easier to understand and keeps the file sizes a bit smaller. Any feedback on this would be very welcome as I'm considering changing over and using voice more.

Anyway. I hope you like the videos and find them useful. There's also a wealth of other useful materials on Russell's site, (as I said in my review of it last year) so be sure to check out the rest of it when you get a minute.

Best

Nik

PS: The image above is of my avatar in my Second Life office. Feel free to visit and look around. It's on Edunation Island at: http://tinyurl.com/ytz5go