shortcomp

Click here for Industrial Tech Game

I’ve just been trying out ClassTools.net, which is a website where you can easily make interactive flash games with no knowledge of flash programming. I think this is a great idea to make interactive content for your classes very easily. The game above took about 5 minutes to make, and  is easily accessible for both teachers, and even very young students.

The above game is simply the syllabus dot points of one of our topics that we do “Government requirements of Industry” for Industrial Technology. Basically, it’s just the first 3 industry study factors. All I had to do was type in (copy and paste) the dot points in the syllabus into different categories, and hit create. The website then creates the interactive game. Knowing a fair amount about flash programming, this would have taken me a couple of hours to do if not for this website.

They also have a number of different templates that you can use, including a labelling, timeline and venn diagram that looks very useful. It’s so easy that you could even get students to create games themselves and then get them to submit them to a wiki, and students can play each others games.

I have been following Steve Dembo’s 30 days to a better blog in order to motivate me to update and improve the blog. I’m about 4 days behind already, but considering that I’ve been HSC Marking, that’s not too bad.

This morning, I’ve added a new RSS feed and  email capabilities.

The next challenge is to test your blog in different browsers. Since I’m extremely lazy at this, about 6 months ago I found this website: http://browsershots.org/ which you can select different browsers and operating systems, and after about five minutes or so, the website will send you back screen captures for each browser, in each operating system. This is a fantastic system, that until now, I’d only used to test student websites. Below are my screen captures from this site:

Just updated the blog with a translation page, so now you can read me in lots of other different languages (if you can read any). Since the only other languages I speak are computer languages, I wouldn’t mind some feedback in comments as to how accurate the tool is.

Click on the “Translate” page above.
Thanks to: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/translate-your-blog-into-different-languages?replies=2 for providing the workaround for wordpress, and http://www.teach42.com/ for their 30 days to a better blog series for suggesting this. I love it!

So, I’ve finally decided on a readable, usable, design friendly template. I wonder whether you can edit the CSS yourself. Something to remember to look into later. I’m also trying to figure out how to get my blogroll showing, becuase although I have some websites in it, it doesn’t seem to be working. Have been working on my ITM wiki for the day, and have put in most of the structure. I’m very happy with it, and also with the fact that I’ve finished all the programming and the description of the major project portfolio. Year 12 almost all planned for next year, with Brad’s addition of the workbooklets.