Kodu is a free game programming environment from Microsoft.  Formerly only for the XBox, it’s now been ported to the PC. Kodu is a visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone.

Key Features

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games.

• High-level language incorporates real-world primitives: collision, color, vision
• Runs on Xbox 360 and PC
• Interactive terrain editor
• Bridge and path builder
• Terrain editor – create worlds of arbitrary shape and size
• 20 different characters with different abilities

You’ll find the following tutorial excellent in terms of getting started.

Design a software application for the SMART Table, and you’ll have the chance to win your own SMART Table.

Prizes

The grand prize for the contest is a SMART Table. SMART will also promote the winning application on the SMART website for one year, giving your school the potential to establish a revenue stream.

Click Here  to find out more.

Spotted the following article in my daily trawl:

“Have you been looking for a way to convert older learning resources into SCORM format? Well Hunterstone may have the answer for you.

HunterStone announced it has developed a “Mass SCORM Conversion Tool.”  The company developed the tool for use in projects that require large amounts of content to be converted to SCORM.  Targeted for use in projects with publishers and organizations that have very large databases of content and learning materials HunterStone President and CEO Neil Richards stated “the tool will save organizations countless hours of time which will directly translate into saving tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in SCORM conversion endeavors.”

The tool is thought to be among the first of its kind used for commercial purposes.  SCORM’s adoption rate is forecasted to accelerate during the next few years and HunterStone’s strategy as a leading provider of SCORM eLearning services is further solidified by this announcement.  Previously, the company released its leading SCORM Conversion and Authoring product suite THESIS for general use by instructional designers, subject matter experts, and trainers throughout the world.  Additionally, Microsoft’s Education Product Group licensed a portion of THESIS technology for use in its Learning Essentials Program and provides Microsoft Academic Customers the ability to author SCORM content with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

THESIS is a suite of eLearning tools which adheres to the SCORM specifications and integrates with Microsoft Office. This enables a user to author eLearning resources and objects straight from familiar Microsoft Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio and Producer. The THESIS “Learning Object Manager” allows a user to author complete SCORM courses and quizzes for online instruction, using multiple learning objects from different sources. THESIS Librarian “SCORM enables” Microsoft SharePoint to create Learning Object Repositories where subject matter experts can collaborate on course development and also use the tool as a meta-data manager.”

I’ve used several online ‘YouTube downloading’ services, although I’d really like a free application that will download the video and convert it to a format for use elsewhere. Well I recently stumbled across YouTube Downloader, its a free application that allows you to download videos from YouTube and many others and convert them to other video formats.The program is easy to use, just specify the URL for the video you want to download and click the OK button!

I’m currently working on a video project about Anne Frank – students work collaboratively to produce a DVD about the Life of Anne Frank. The students have been provided with a selection of clips ripped from a DVD (copyright permission has been agreed) and stills from the DVD. Students ‘reconstruct’ the DVD from the component clips, adding their own narration and clips they’ve filmed.

I’ve created a guide for teachers and students on using the relevant technology to complete the project, the guide needed to illustrate several scenes from the DVD. But just how do you capture scenes from a DVD ideally for FREE? MovieMaker can only take stills from specific video formats and not DVD. There are several DVD player applications that will (PowerDVD etc), although we don’t have any of them at school on student PCs or on teacher laptops. Well it is possible – VLC Player a free media player supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs and most importantly has a snapshot function.

How then do you take a snapshot from a DVD with VLC Player?

Step 1

Download and install VLC Player

Step 2

Insert DVD into your computer’s DVD drive – If you’re running Windows XP you’ll be asked what you would like to do.

Select Play back with VLC

Step 3

The DVD will now playback in VLC Player

Select the scene you wish to capture a still from.

Select Tools > Capture

Step 4

The scene will be captured as a Jpeg and by default is saved to My Documents / My Pictures

The still image (JPEG) captured from the DVD. This can now be added to storyboards, worksheets and guides.

VLC Player is available as a free download from:

http://www.videolan.org/

Mac Users

If you’re using a Mac and would like to capture still images from a DVD – DVD Capture 2.5 is a free ‘helper’ application for the Apple DVD Player. It enables the user to take screen captures of the DVD Player Viewer in window and full screen mode. The captures can be saved to a file or placed on the clipboard.

DVD Capture can be downloaded from:

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Video/DVD-Capture.shtml

The digital revolution has allowed ‘ordinary’ people to get usable software for word processing, desktop publishing and graphics to improve their communication on paper. Web 2.0 applications allow ordinary people to create blogs, wikis and websites. But creativity and particularly interactivity has traditionally been the domain of the programmer.

How many times have you looked at some of the polished interactive content generated by publishing companies and wanted a tool to create similar learning content? Things are changing! RM has recently been displaying a content creation tool called ‘Fuse’. The product developed by one of RM’s companies 3T, allows ‘lay users’ to create interactive learning content without the need for expensive programmers and web designers.

The learning materials created by Fuse can work on anything that’s compatible with Adobe’s Flash software – that includes PC and Mac web browsers, most handheld computers and many current models of mobile phones. The implications are exciting but RM is still on its learning journey.

Are you a Smart Notebook user? Would you like to share your Notebook resources with individuals who don’t have Notebook?

I’ve been waiting for this for some time, and the bods at Smarttech have finally done it! With the release of ‘Notebook Interactive Viewer’ you can now share the content and lessons you create with your Notebook software.

The viewer will allow you to exchange files with individuals who don’t have the full version of Notebook. This is great for students, now they can access learning resources used in lessons from home without the need for the full version of Notebook which is quite a weighty download.

You can also view your Notebook created content on a any brand of interactive whiteboard.

There is an open license so it can be installed on every computer in a school and on student home computers.

The Smart Notebook Interactive Viewer is available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms from the link below.

Download Smart Notebook Interactive Viewer

For everyone involved in SharePoint and Education this is a must have download.

http://www.codeplex.com/LG

This refresh is designed to deliver a set of web parts that will make SharePoint 2007 immediately relevant to the education and training market. To minimize the amount of time you need to spend configuring components, these web parts have been built to work together, and a new deployment guide designed to simplify deployment. Significant in this release is new information architecture that more clearly supports a diverse set of sites and workspaces, as well as better customization and use of in-built MOSS capabilities such as blogs and wikis.

You should also look at the SharePoint Learning Kit

http://www.codeplex.com/SLK

SharePoint Learning Kit is a SCORM 2004-conformant e-learning delivery and tracking application built as a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 solution. It works with either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and has the following core features:

• Supports SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and Class Server content, allowing users to store and manage this content in SharePoint document libraries.
• Supports learner-centric and instructor-led (assigned) workflows.
• Allows assignment, tracking and grading of both e-learning and non-e-learning content.

Looking for free or open source software for your Mac? Then look no further, the fantastic site The Free Mac Classroom outlines some of the best free software for the Mac.

There are some titles that I use already, although I think I’ll be using much more in the future!

http://web.mac.com/simon_elliott/iWeb/simon_elliott@mac.com/Software.html

There are some titles that I use already, although I think I’ll be using much more in the future!