Like games?

Then you might be interested in collaborating with the Wordia team on an exciting video-based interactive game!

This September, we’re looking for folk to come down to the FreeWord Centre in central London and spend a pleasant few hours exploring a new interactive casual game format with us. An exciting new casual game meets video-hybrid…

Teas and coffees provided and a dedicated game – featuring you – to take away!

We’ve just built a prototype and we’d love your thoughts on it, so whether you’re a teacher, gamer or digital expert – or just like fun new interactive tech – come down and play:

http://www.freewordonline.com/events/?event_id=169

We’re collaborating with the lovely guys at FreeWord Centre, as part of the FLOW festival. If you like to know more about this, drop us a line at: info@wordia.com

The Wordia team

The Wordia team have been rather busy of late, developing Wordia Schools and testing what we’ve created in different learning environments (Primary and Secondary Schools, youth clubs and Online Learning Centres…), exploring just how Wordia can be used at the Desktop, at the Whiteboard, on an iPad or  Mobile etc.

So were really excited when the good chaps at Preedy Solutions suggested that Wordia could work brilliantly within a multi-touch technology environment!

Here’s a example of one of their excellent solution displaying Wordia’s video content (very Minority Report)!

We’ve just got back from three days of field research at St Matthews Academy in Lewisham, South London. Three days of field testing Wordia Schools and our exciting new interactive educational game, the Human Crossword. Three fantastic, challenging days with a great bunch of pupils and St. Matthews educators….

Here at Wordia HQ, we’re keen on ensuring that everything Wordia-related is educator-led, and pupil tested. But when you’re trying to do something new (to use video to educate and entertain, and in a new game format…) it’s not such a simple progress! Needless to say that the last three days of piloting a new interactive game concept with a mixed ability group, of mixed ages was challenging – but very worthwhile and immensely rewarding (in both a professional and personal sense).

We’re hopefully going to release an early Beta game of the Human Crossword in the next few weeks, so stay tuned! But in the interim, a very big thank you to the lovely educators at St. Matthews, in particular Margaret, Claire and Martin who were so generous with both their time, and patience!

On a similar note, a very big thank you to everyone for all the super inventive, educational game suggestions! We were bowled over by how many passionate gamers and educationalist there are out there (and who use Wordia). Thanks for all the game suggestions and ideas. We hope to be able to turn some of these ideas into reality, and get them into the classroom over the next few months.

If you’re interested in joining our schools pilot (yup, we know it’s the Summer holidays, but even so…), then please do drop us a line at production@wordia.com

We’d love to hear from you.

Cheers,

The Wordia team

St Matthews Academy: http://www.stmatthewacademy.co.uk/

It’s nice when someone appreciates your hard work – and gets what we’re trying to achieve!

The Nerdy Teacher very kindly wrote a blog post about Wordia today – just a few days after we released the new look Wordia 2.0.

http://thenerdyteacher.blogspot.com

Input from educators like the Nerdy Teacher means that we’ll create a really useful classroom resource – something that resonates with a modern audience. Thanks Nick!

If you’re interested in Wordia Schools, drop us a line on: schools@wordia.com (or sign up here: http://www.wordia.com/Schools)

The Wordia team

Today, we’ve just launched a new look Wordia

‘Wordia 2.0′ is finally out the door, after many many months of hard work and focus (phew!).

Is our new look better? We think so. Is Wordia more usable as a dictionary? For sure! Can you discover exciting video contributions more easily now? Absolutely!

But what do you think?

Do you like our new focus, on international languages and how Wordia can be used in the classroom (we hope so!)? Or what do you think of our new mascot, ‘Wordy’ the word owl (perched in the top corner over there!)?

So thanks for sticking with us so far, it’s been an interesting journey, and if you’ve contributed video – a big thank you! We’ve a few more exciting changes coming in the next few months, so stay tuned.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you on: info@wordia.com

Cheers!

The Wordia team

Today the Wordia team were over at Olympic Head Quarters in Canary Wharf, East London exploring the yet-to-be-released Wordia Schools with the education team.

Here’s a snap of the view from their office – 24 floors up!

It was completely captivating, even through the London weather was typically overcast and grey. In the distance (if you can spot it) is the stadium, and to the right, the velodrome.

It’s an incredible vista and must be nice to look out of your office and see the physical changes in the landscape, day to day.

It was a real privilege to meet some of the key people at LOGOG who’ve been studiously working on the London bid for years…

It’s their hard work that’s brought the Games here to Blightly and we’re hopeful that Wordia will be part of 2012 events in some form or another.

All aboard the comedy train set to whip through Wordia station next week! We have been busy catching up with comedy friends old and new. The sketch comedy pair of Mould and Arrowsmith are the first stop on Monday so be sure to catch their definition of recursion, as well as our old friend George Rygold and many more.

This week has seen a great response to our Gay Africa campaign in conjunction with The Red Rooms (http://www.theredroom.org.uk/hoxton.htm) and we’ve been covering a great subject with a fantastic range of contributors and words. If you haven’t seen any then please take a moment to sit back and enjoy:

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2010/2/22

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2010/2/24

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2010/2/26

We are continuing to film more exciting words with excellent contributors for our Creative Arts week that begins on the 15th March. I was lucky enough this week to catch up the Kenneth Tharp, who is the Chief Executive of The Place that is a dance and performance arts centre. Kenneth’s performing career included working with London Contemporary Dance Theatre (1981-1994) and Arc Dance Company (1994-2005). He has worked extensively as a choreographer, teacher and director and as Lead Artist & Artistic Advisor for The Royal Ballet School’s Dance Partnership & Access Programme and Assistant to the Head of Contemporary Dance at Millennium Dance 2000. With composer Simon Redfern he co-founded Artyfartyarts, a multi disciplinary arts group, and he is on the Board of Trustees at the Royal Opera House. In 2003, he was awarded an OBE for services to dance, and he undertook a NESTA funded Fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme in 2005/6.

Kenneth was a pleasure to meet and gave a great definition of ‘Instinct’ which will be live on Wordia during our Creative Arts week, so be sure to check back to see Kenneth in action.

It has been another busy week at Wordia towers as we are gearing up for our next campaign working with the great and talented people at theredropoms.org.uk on their Gay Africa campaign.

On Monday I got to catch up with a great friend of the Wordia team Dean Atta, who is a very talented poet and theatre producer. We are working with Dean on the Gay Africa campaign which aims to bring a collection of poets, authors and public speakers together to discuss and explore the issues within the Gay community.

The Gay Africa event is being held at The Free Word Centre (www.freewordonline.com) on Sunday 28th February and we invite you all to come along and listen to some great minds discussing this great campaign. Be sure to check out Wordia.com everyday next week to catch some of the speakers defining a new word for us everyday.

On Tuesday I we got the chance to mix it up a little bit as we caught up the Vauxhall UK Beatboxing 2009 champion MC Zani. Zani took us step by step though what is the word ‘beat’ means to him and gave us a quick lesson in how to beat box so make sure you check MC Zani out on the site at:

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2010/2/18

Zani is a world-class beatboxer who has worked with the likes of Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift and Alicia Keys. However, Zani has not let this go to his head and still works in his local community with kids and young people on youth schemes encouraging kids beatbox and apply themselves to this or any other art form.

We are still working on out huge project with the team at Artis and we are now in the process of booking a venue and a date for the launch of this campaign so we will keep you posted with more details as soon as we get them.
We did get the chance to meet up with Baroness McIntosh this week for a coffee and a definition.  Baroness McIntosh (or Jenny as she insisted that we call her) is a British arts consultant, theatre executive and Labour politician and works very closely with the team at Artis.

Jenny explored with is the meaning of creation and how important it is to encourage children to create new ideas, concepts and art to keep themselves creatively satisfied.

Jenny also mentioned to us that she had recently been on the ‘You & Yours’ BBC radio 4 show discussing children’s TV and the amount of imports we have from America and Japan as apposed to UK made content. Jenny is a firm believer in the UK as well as the power of a child’s mind and believes that we as a nation should be taking greater initiatives to create better TV content for our children rather than importing other programs and shows to fill the gaps in the schedules.

Keep your eyes peeled on the site next week for all the Gay Africa words, as don’t forget to check back into the blog next week as I am due to meet with comedian Tania Edwards and dance artist and Chief Executive of The Place Kenneth Tharp.

Well, then you’ll love our new word quiz: VOCABILITY - a word challenge game with a difference!

Test just good your vocabulary is – and how many words you know compared to your friends – in our new, never-ending word quiz. Challenge your buddies and the rest of the world – and test your vocability!

Good luck.

http://www.wordia.com/Games/biggest-vocabulary/question

A very happy new year from the Wordia Team

It’s been a fair few weeks since our last blog posting here at Wordia towers, as like most tech or video content start-ups, we’re been absolutely snowed with work – importantly, pushing forward on a few different fronts!

We’re now super busy developing Wordia Schools: a dedicated Wordia schools environment that works within school online safety filter and is private for security purposes…

But as a small team, it’s not easy pushing forward on a few levels. For starters, two development environments near-doubles the team’s work-load – from both a technical and content production perspective. We’re making these changes as we can see the potential in a collaborative, ‘learning by doing’ audio-visual schools dictionary – and it looks like some of you do too!

Over the last few months we’ve created a Pilot group of passionate literacy and ‘ICT in the classroom’ educators – individuals and schools excited about the potential of what Wordia Schools could become – folk, keen to help steer our direction in education. It’s this shared belief and opportunity that adds to the excitement – and challenge (and keeps us going!).

If you hadn’t spotted it, we theme our Word of the Day videos by weekly topic, so this week we’ve taken a playful and light-hearted approach to the Christmas period, filming with some fantastic comedians and entertainers exploring Crimbo-language, from Danny Robins, to Tiernan Douieb, to  McNeil and Pamphilon.

The mighty McNeil and Pamphilon:

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2009/12/14

We’re always on the look out for partners for our themed weeks (we develop and produce 52 themed weeks per year!), so if you have an suggestion or an idea for a week, then we’d love to hear from you! Please drop us a line at: production@wordia.com

Oh and if you missed it, one of our favourite recent themed weeks was in partnership with the British Library, when we explored the language of entrepreneurship with some of the Dragon’s from BBC’s Dragon’s Den!

Doug Richard:

http://www.wordia.com/wotd/2009/11/18

Enjoy!

Wordia team