Let’s take a few moments to visit a cool place to learn English and have fun… Mingoville – A Virtual World

From the People at Mingoville

Like the Mingoville School you are familiar with, the new Mingoville World is also based on the belief that kids learn better when they have fun and when they decide when and where to learn.

In the Mingoville World, all activities and games are in English. We have developed a whole universe based on fun and exciting educational games and exercises that teach children English while they play online.

At Mingoville, we have been working hard to develop a virtual world where learning English is 100% integrated into all games and exercises. A virtual world allows kids to practice and learn English without even thinking about it. We hope you enjoy it and consider using this new teaching tool in your curriculum.

Good News

Mingoville is free. You have free access to the Mingoville School and the Mingoville World. However, it is also possible to buy extended access to the Mingoville World and become a SuperLearner. As a SuperLearner, the student will have access to more fun educational games and the possibility of buying clothes and other things for his flamingo.

Monstro City holds exciting alleys and ingenious shops. I dare you to traverse the land of Moshi Monsters. Change your monsters clothes to show off their personal style. Customize the different monsters colors, and give them a home. You can even decorate their room, and have your friends rate it. Find items to decororate your room and add the horror to your monsters house!

Go from Ooh La Lane, to Sludge Street, and from there to Gift Island. See what you cand discover in Monstro City! Start your very own garden by planting seeds to attract cute, atrocious, or terrifying Moshlings.

When all of that serious exploring has tired out your Moshi Monster, you can go home to your personal domain. Don’t forget to feed your monster! Visit the Puzzle Palace and Moshling Garden. You may visit the Port as well, and the Dress Up Room. Does your sassy pet want to see the DIY shop, or maybe Horrods. Explore all the Monstro streets. They are your gateway to games, and meeting new Monsters. Let’s not forget to say “Hi”!

Ages: 7-10 Fun for all ages, and younger kids.
Safety: Very safe Community for all Monsters.
Fun: Super, super fun for young Moshi’s
Navigate: Easy. Very easy site to navigate.
Price – Free

Adoption Monster Rules

Play Safe – Keep your personal information personal.
Respect the Moshi Community – Treat Moshi players with respect, and you will be respected.
No Bullying or Rudeness – Put your best behaviour foot forward.
No Cheating or Scamming – Scamming and cheating are stealing.. don’t do it!

This post is courtesy of my daughter, who shall remain unnamed, yet is a faithful and fearless Moshi Monster who enjoys having fun and trekking through the colorful lands of cyber space. Thank you dear…

Description

A reluctant hero. An epic journey. A choice between the life he left behind and the incredible new world he’s learned to call home. Return to James Cameron’s Avatar — the greatest adventure of all time.

Enjoy!

The site can be a bit slow to load, but the different areas are colorful and imaginative. The games are standard fare and girls can view videos featuring their favorite Barbie™ movies. She can also enjoy an enhanced Barbie Girls® experience with a V.I.P. membership, which would grant her access to exclusive areas, allow her to adopt virtual pets, “spend” B Bucks®, and play a number of great members-only games.

Did someone say fashion and boys all the same sentence? Two of the hottest subjects of most girls, so this Virtual World just may have some kind of special appeal to those girls between the ages of 8 – 15.

Cost: Free for basic membership, $5.99/month for VIP (multi-month discounts available)

As always, our kids safety is top priority. Please always remember to visit a site with your child to decide if it’s the best site for your family rules and values. Although the best of safety measures have been incorporat

I would like to get her something small enough to carry around in her pocket or purse, yet still have enough virtual memory to get plenty of footage. We need something simple to operate, with enough features to make it fun, and allow her to express her creative nature. We are always looking for new material to work with in our Artistic Expressions class. She loves to share, so the video camera will also need to carry the proper software to upload videos easily onto YouTube and such.

We are quite fortunate that technologies are advancing as quickly as they are, because I do believe I have found the perfect fit for our needs. Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom comes loaded with the features we are looking for! Let me give a quick view of what this sweet little pocket video camcorder has to offer.

Technical Details

~ High definition 720P pocket video camcorder with 8 GB of video storage capacity
~ Fits easily in your pocket purse or the palm of your hand
~ One touch recording with a spacious 2 inch display
~ Record up to two hours of HD video footage or up to four hours of video at VGA resolution
~ Connect your Vado HD to any HDTV with included HDMI cable

Manufacturer Product Description

From the Manufacturer Catch the perfect snowboarding stunt, your baby’s first steps or your kid’s graduation, share it online and save it for a lifetime with Creative’s Vado HD Pocket Video Cam. The thin, lightweight Vado HD is small enough to fit easily in a pocket, purse or the palm of your hand, and it captures video in 720P high-definition quality with just the touch of a button.

Sharing videos online is simple with built-in software that helps you post videos to YouTube, Photobucket or Box.net. The Vado HD is the only pocket video cam to feature true HDMI connectivity and an included HDMI cable for a superior viewing experience on an HDTV. Take the Vado HD Pocket Video Cam with you everywhere you go and never miss a moment.

Product specs include 720p high-definition video, wide-angle glass lens, 2x digital zoom, 8GB of video storage capacity, up to two hours of recording and playback per charge, up to eight hours of recording time at 640×480 at 30 frames per second, HDMI and RCA connections for TV, HDMI cable included, A/V cable sold separately, removable and rechargeable lithium battery, Vado Central software for simple video editing and sharing.

System requirements include Windows Xp Service Pack 2 or Vista, Intel Pentium III or higher, 512MB of memory, USB port, 500MB free hard disk space, and 16MB of Video Memory or above. Product ships with soft pouch, HDMI cable, and USB cable.

As I teach my daughter her academics from home, I am always on the lookout for new ways to spice up our curriculum. She is really into writing stories, taking pictures, and putting slide shows together to share with family and friends. This is an art in itself, and when I showed her Moviestorm she got pretty excited! The timing is perfect, as we were looking for a cool movie maker that carries more features than our basic windows movie maker, and we decided to check this out.

My daughter has a project planned for our Artistic Expressions class, and I am interested to see what she can do with this software. She is totally into fantasy, so I imagine she can put her talents to the test with a great plot using her imagination, with colorful characters, animation, and totally cool sets to grab the viewers attention.

We were happy to discover that it is free to download the software, create avatars, and so much more. It sounds great, even for beginners, as it takes no experience to get started. The basic setup is free, yet we do have the option to pay for additional characters, animations, and props. This can definately serve to take a persons creativity to a whole new level!

Basic Features

~ Get going quickly with our library of ready-to-use stock sets, including interiors, exteriors, and even spaceships!
~ Customise the stock sets or build your own from scratch
~ Save your sets and re-use them in other movies
~ Buy more props and sets from the Moviestorm store

Customization Options

~ Use the customisable complete buildings or assemble your own
~ Tintable textures for walls, floors and ceilings
~ Fully animated doors and transparent windows
~ Add your own images to pictures, posters, etc.
~ Resize, modify and recolour props to create unique variants
~ Place props at any angle – no square grids!
~ Add videos to TV and computer screens
~ Animated textures bring props to life
~ Multiple skies give you night, day, sunset, etc
~ Add lens flare from the sun
~ Fully controllable ambient and directional lights
~ Add extra lighting with on-set lights, including streetlights, table lamps, moving spotlights, lasers, and concert lighting rigs
~ Switch shadows on or off for different effects
~ Add background sounds and sound effects
~ Quickly create unique sets by pasting photographic images onto backdrops
~ You can change your set, even in the middle of making a movie

Advanced Features

~ Greenscreen floors and backdrops make it easy to combine Moviestorm footage with other video sources
~ Share your stock sets with other Moviestorm users
~ Import items from Google Sketchup (requires Modder’s Workshop – currently in beta)
~ Create your own props and set dressing using standard 3D modelling tools (requires Modder’s Workshop – currently in beta)

Moviestorm is enabling a new generation of amateur film-makers to realize their visions.  It offers easy, affordable animation tools that can produce sophisticated high-quality films on practically no budget. After several years in development, Moviestorm has demonstrated that home movie-making needn’t be limited to cheap hand-held cameras and clips of the kids goofing around. Its virtual movie studio allows users to break free of the limitations of the real world, and allows them to direct, film, edit and distribute 3D animated movies without any knowledge of animation techniques or 3D modelling. And best of all, it’s free, and comes without any copyright restrictions. 

Iain Friar, known as IceAxe, is one of Moviestorm’s many successful film-makers.  His short film, Clockwork, a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain after a Soviet invasion in the 1980s, is winning accolades and awards around the world, most recently the audience prize at the Atopic Festival in France and the Grand Prize at the Machinima Expo.  Clearly influenced by both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a visual style that evokes both Communist era propaganda posters and more recent animated movies such as A Scanner Darkly, it is a stark, powerful film that belies its modest origins.

Iain, who’s 42, works in marketing, and started making movies just 18 months ago. “I’ve always been a hands-on person, in music, sport, and everything else,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to shoot a music video, but I’m not the most technical of people, and it seemed extraordinarily hard.  I remember when computer games started using in-game animation to tell the story instead of video clips, and this interested me, especially now that game technology has become so sophisticated. So I bought a book, Machinima for Dummies, which had Moviestorm on the CD, and I was hooked. I liked Moviestorm because it did what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for at the time, and the Moviestorm community was very supportive.  I initially made comedies, but I could see that the movies people respected were more dramatic, so it seemed that was the direction to go in.”

He spent four months working on Clockwork, and then the same again on his next short, Cloud Angel, a steampunk thriller set on board an airship.  Apart from the voice acting, he made the entire film himself at his home in Basingstoke, England.  “I’m lucky that my friends are so willing to step up to the mike and read my silly scripts!” he laughs. His next film is Gridlock, a science fiction comedy which he is co-producing with another successful Moviestorm director, James Thorpe.  For this, they’ve stepped up the production costs a notch: they hired a recording studio and got the local amateur dramatic group to do the voice acting.

Iain is realistic about his future, though.  “Am I ambitious? Yes. Do I want to keep it as just a hobby? Well, probably yes, because I imagine that if it became a full time activity, the fun might go out of it. I make movies as escapism. That said, I think that this industry would be really interesting to work in, because it’s embryonic; I’m not sure what direction it will go in. It’s exciting!”

Moviestorm’s CEO, Jeff Zie, is hugely enthusiastic and supportive.  “Iain and the many other Moviestorm users are an inspiration to us all,” he says. “We’re really proud that we’re giving talented people like this the tools they need to unleash the creative potential they never knew they had, and to produce these wonderful films.”

Try it and see!

You can download Moviestorm for free: Windows and Mac versions are available. If you want, you can expand your virtual film studio and buy extra costumes, sets, props, and sounds in their marketplace. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be the next Tarantino, Ang Lee, or J J Abrams, now’s the time to find out!