Game Maker

Game maker is an innovation that creates games. Game Maker is intended to allow users to develop their own games (including characters - or sprites, backgrounds, walls, music and objects).


It is intricate and somewhat complicated to create the games as there are a number of ways to achieve the same result, which means that it is very confusing to learn. However, once you have the hang on if it you are able to work your own way through it and develop some fantastic games. Innovations such as this one can allow for students to develop their problem solving skills, metacognition and higher thinking cognitive skills, which can be beneficial within the classroom.

You can play games created by other people using the same program through the yoyo games forum however you do not receive the information behind the game you are only able to play the game online.

There is support available in the form of forums, emails, blogs and tutorials, however there are not a tutorial available that covers all aspects of Game Maker 0.7.
Game Maker 0.8 is being released soon.

Personally, I dont believe that this would be very beneficial in classrooms (particularly for younger students) as it is very time consuming to learn and it is difficult to incorporate into other learning areas. Whilst I can see that there are some benefits in programs like this, I feel that there are more time conservative ways to cover the same benefits.

Glogster

Glogger is an innovation that allows students to create online interactive posters. Known as 'Glogs' students are able to embed videos, images and music as well as use the available backgrounds, speech bubbles, images and animations.
Glogger.edu allows teachers to create student accounts for each individual student and to then monitor these accounts, including any messages that come in or are sent between students.

These student accounts are set to private so that people outside of the classroom (or school) are unable to contact the students. Through having an edu account teachers are able to minimise students exposure to any unsuitable topics.

There are a number of benefits to this innovation, including the fact that there is no software to be installed, glogs can be adapted to suit a variety of learning areas. Glogs can also be embedded into facebook, myspace, hotmail and a number of other websites which can allow for projects to be collaborated and kept together, or for glogs to be a part of an assignment rather than a whole assignment.

The minus's associated with glogster include the possibility that students will become carried away with the creativity aspect of creating the poster and forget to focus on the actual content - however this could be solved through the teacher encouraging students to plan before they begin to create their glog. Another negative aspect is there is a high possibility that this will not appeal to all students, however it is up to the teacher to assess this risk and to incorporate the innovation accordingly.

This innovation could easily be incorporated into a classroom, whether it be as part of an assignment, a whole assignment or an option in an assignment this innovation can be modified to suit a variety of classroom situations, year levels or subject matters. As it is likely to not appeal to all students, it could be beneficial to have this innovation as a presentation option or as an option within an assignment. Glogs are also environmentall friendly, and easily edited and managed which allows for them to be student directed.

Glogs can be embedded either by posting a link to their glog in their wiki, facebook page, myspace page, blog etc, like this http://s006.teacherlorraine.edu.glogster.com/Christmas-glog/
or it can be embedded as an image as shown above.


This is definately a safe, worthwhile innovation to incorporate into a classroom that is easily adaptable to suit a wide variety of classrooms, students, and subject areas that i will definately incorporate into my class.