Nintendo DS Games Based Learning

Imagine Teacher
Fill the shoes of a promising young teacher in a brand new school and use your skills to increase your class size, develop your students and create the best learning environment.
The game begins with 4 children in the class, the player has the power to seat the children within the class and set the timetable for the week. You then have to work through a variety of mini games within each curricular subject area. As you work through the weeks, more children join the class and you must also juggle their needs and develop their skills.
Most suited to early years as all mini games are a very basic level so older children may find it too easy and become bored.

Advantages
Fine motor skills developed and good hand/eye coordination on the touch/rub the objects and expressive arts mini games.
Increasing basic maths skills. (early years)
Developing basic general knowledge within the history, science and geography mini games.
Bright, colourful graphics.
Easy to follow.
Disadvantages
Games are set at a very basic level so player may become bored easily.
In my opinion, the game is best suited for early years but there may be too much reading for them to follow.

Hotel Dusk
Take control of an interactive mystery novel and discover the secrets of Hotel Dusk. Who is Kyle Hyde - and what mysteries lie behind Room 215?
Take stylus in hand and navigate a tangled web of lies, betrayal, and murder to learn the answers.
 The game begins with a very long introduction so I quickly lost interest with it as we are working with limited time in class.

Advantages
Set out like an interactive mystery novel so encourages reading in upper stages.
Disadvantages
Slow starting due to a very long (and boring) introduction, loss of interest may occur.
Suitable for ages 12+ due to violence and bad langauge.

Crazy Talk

Crazy Talk is a program which allows you to bring your pictures to life by giving them facial movements and a voice over. The program was relatively simple to use as we followed the online tutorials and instructions set for us here. I feel, these Crazy Talk avatars would be a great engaging stimulus to use in the classroom, especially within the early years or nursery. They would make a good introductory activity to a new topic or perhaps a lesson focussed on a famous person or inventor, where said person could talk to the class. They could talk to the children and give them information about themsleves and the class could then use this information to write notes about their new topic This would also tie into the following curriculum outcomes:

As I listen or watch, I am learning to make notes under given headings and use these to understand what I have listened to or watched and create new texts.  LIT 1-05
As I listen or watch, I can make notes, organise these under suitable headings and use these to understand ideas and information and vreate new texts, using my own words as appropriate.  LIT 2-05

We used Crazy Talk to design a character relating to our Wiki topic, my groups being 'People Who Help Us'. We each took one of our 'helpers' and created an avatar related to their job. We then placed these on the relevant Wiki activity page. I feel these avatars make the information more accessable to children as they can listen to the character talking about their job, rather than having to read the information.