Game and Be Healthy

From Gamasutra: Ubisoft Announces Pedometer-Driven My Health Coach: DS

Plug your pedometer into your DS and you're on your way to making fitness a lot more fun. The product, entitled My Health Coach: Weight Management, by Ubisoft is set to hit retail shelves this summer. Players are trained on proper ways to maintain the balance between diet and exercise and are generally rewarded for healthy behavior. Whoever said that gaming was an unhealthy hobby had best be rethinking that notion!

productive play

Forming healthy habits and promoting activities that are helpful are at the core of the new virtual world for kids and tweens: HandiLand: http://www.handipoints.com. Parents set up a list of tasks and kids can received in-game currency for doing those tasks in the real world. I wonder if it will fly with the Club Penguin set that seems content to collect and spend their points in-game - and if it will pass the "cool" test for kids on the upper end of the target age range spectrum (e.g., 10-12 year olds) but it is definitely a great concept from a parental point of view.

online slideshow applications offer new way to share

From: TechLearning, March 1, 2008 (by Cory Plough): Web 2.0 Tools Motivate Student Creativity

This article suggests what many have suggested before: that students perform better when they are creating material for an audience beyond their classroom. In addition to blogs, it cites a few presentation applications that facilitate sharing beyond school walls:

Slideshare allows users to create shows in PowerPoint (or similar software) and them upload them to the web.

Zoho Show is a web based application and therefore accessible to those who merely have access to the web (and not necessarily a host of expensive software).

Or how about Animoto, a video production website that allows users to upload pictures, pick music, and produce a short 30 second movie.

Acccording to Plough: "It's hard to assess student learning in a 30 second project, but using this tool to replace a paragraph or two of an essay or as an intro to a presentation project gets students interested in the assignment." If a picture's worth 1000 words, then a 30 second video (which Animoto suggests 12-20 images for) is worth a least a couple pages of written work.

But wait, there's more! From Plough's blog (which I'm adding to my list of links):

Toondoo allows users to create comics or cartoons and share them with others.

Sketchcast is an online program that allows you to create sketches mixed with your voice.

Voicethread lets you add your voice over pictures.

Overstream allows you to put words over a video that you or someone else has created.

I would have loved having more teachers like him when I was in school!