By: TwitterButtons.com
By TwitterButtons.com

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

How to Share your homemade video game on Edmodo and a Gamestar Mechanic Prezi

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This is a Jing tutorial that I made for my students so that they could learn on how to complete their game and then post the URL on our Edmodo site
Gamestar_Mechanic_Tutorial_-_Share_your_game_on_Edmodo.mp4 Watch on Posterous

 

Also, if there are any teachers out there that would like to do something fun, unique and engaging with your students - I would HIGHLY recommend you check out the site of gamestarmechanic.com.  They offer up some great Teacher Resources as well. What I did was I went through the majority of their teacher resources and I have compiled the majority of the basic game design steps into a Prezi (which is like a PowerPoint on steroids.)  Below is a copy of my Prezi if you would like to use this in your classroom. (It is still a work in progress so be sure to check up frequently)

 

 

 

 

Friday, April 15, 2011

Gamestar Mechanic Games by my students

Try Antonio's game

CJ T.'s game (very challenging)

DJ's game

Lee's game

Jeremy's game

Christian's Game

Alex's game

Friday, April 8, 2011

Create your own video game like this one on Game Star Mechanic

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You can check out this game that I created below by using the awesome web 2.0 tool, Gamestar Mechanic. It isn't the greatest game in the world, but the fact that I could create one and post it on the internet to share is pretty amazing, and why I am looking forward to teaching this to my students next week.

 

What is great about Gamestar, is that it is well balanced between playing, learning and creating. The site ACTUALLY encourages its users to play the video games through their tutorials called "Quest." The Quest is a little story that has the look and feel of a Japanese Manga, but as you play the game, you begin to learn the basics of video game design and you unlock characters and items to include in your games.

In FACT, you can't even publish your game until you complete all five episodes. So, as a teacher, I feel that this is a great (and free) tool to use with my students. Some of the games may be a little simple and cheesy, and the kids may be a bit frustrated that they can't import/create their own characters, items, music or backgrounds, BUT it is an excellent way for your students to create something utilizing 21st century skills, heavily bound by STEM standards, read comics while they learn and share their work on the internet for the world to play.

And coming from a gamer's perspective, for someone who grew up with a Nintendo Enterntainment System in their home as a kid and has since gone through the several generations of video game consoles, I think is a great way to hook the students into their own interests. If you have a student that is interested on some day creating their own games, check this one out to just get used to the whole theory and practice behind game design, but if you really want to get crazy with video game programming, then I would recommend Scratch (which is a bit more complicated)

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Jay Cut Tutorials - How to upload clips, edit them and publish a final film for the internet

Listed below are a variety of tutorials that I created for my students using the Jing software. I enjoy using Jay Cut because it is an online program, which means that students can easily edit their clips from any computer that is connected to the internet but it unfortunately has an extremely slow loading time for each time that you have to re-render a clip.

Also, if you are interested about a more in-depth review for the program of Jaycut (which can be found at www.jaycut.com) please check out my article on Associated Content right HERE

From Dropbox to JayCut

jay_cut_tutorial_upload_footage.mp4 Watch on Posterous

My basic tutorial for the students to upload their clips to Dropbox, download them from Dropbox, and then upload the clips to Jaycut.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

6th grade Glogs on Religion

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I collaborated with the 6th grade Social Studies teachers so that our students would create a Glog (which is like a simple web site w/o knowing html code, or perhaps a digital form of a poster/display board) that showcased the beliefs and artworks of a religion, compared/contrasted it to another religion and that the students could feature their resources and basic design principles of a web site.  Listed below are some of the best and most viewed Glogs that those students created.