Group items tagged

Happy Steve blog post chronicling ongoing student work on a Second Life Teen Grid Island. Booralie Island is the virtual extension of a Christian school located in Sydney, Australia. Their island is largely student created and used for many different subjects. Happy Steve is also a great example of a technology infused enthusiastic teacher. This post details students building a war memorial, scripted recording studio, coliseum ... on their own time and after school.

Daniel LIvingstone's post listing  Free stuff for virtual worlds and game based learning good beginning list!

Second Life Viewer 2.0 (now the default viewer for Second Life users) allows new capabilities to share and embed many types of online media. This blog post explains and points to some beginning examples of this powerful feature.

lokiboy is a great example of an avatar blog - blurring the boundaries between 2D and 3D onlines spaces. Shadow of the 13 is an in-world roleplaying mystery - complete with clues and an online website. (See post)

This post details possible causes of low performance for those accessing virtual worlds with low end computers. This is just one of many design considerations when designing a virtual environment for a specific learning audience. Short story: The more graphics a computer needs to "see" (ie: load), the slower it is going to run.

Resourceful blog on 3D worlds and ADDIE posted from last summer! Several links and video tutorial included.

Continuing my theme of visiting virtual versions of Bay Area museums, I really enjoyed the virtual Exploratorium. In flatland, the Exploratorium is famous for their hands-on displays. It is very kid-friendly, and is a fun place to visit for all ages. I was interested to see how they would transfer this hands-on approach to learning into Second Life. I was not disappointed. The exhibits are very original and very interactive, and I had a lot of fun exploring. I will definitely be returning to the virtual Exploratorium. A previous Diigo post talks about the virtual Exploratorium, so I found this great video that shows off a number of the exhibits. Hopefully it will inspire you to visit it yourself!

Though I know this is one of the places already listed, it is also one of the places my group and I visited together, which leads me to believe I need to post it again. Sorry for any redundancy. Generally, This place had a lot to see, but some of it wasn't really working. I had trouble accessing a few things that would have been really neat had they worked.

Like my last post, I found this "show" on Treet.tv as well. A great forum start with tons of excellent screencasts of SL interviews and presentations. The last few episodes of the show included:" 5 years of Creative Research in SL," " Maslow's Hierarchical Hideaway in SL," Teaching Math in Virtual Worlds," "Learning 3D: A New Educational Dimension," and "WoW (World of Warcraft) in Schools.

One of the greatest challenges we face as high school physical education teachers is getting our students to be motivated. Although it is costly to have this sort of virtual reality equipment at our school, it is something that we can possibly plan for the future and have as an activity for days in which our teaching areas are affected by rainy day, construction, testing, or for students who cannot have long exposure to the sun. Sounds fun ☺

Yeah, I think in PE (or in any content area), finding a way to connect with our students and motivate them is crucial. I envision being able to integrate a Wii game system with a 3D Muve so that our students will actually have to be physically active in order to move their avatar in the virtual world,

Carolina, Does the P.E. curriculum call for daily physical activity? Perhaps one or two days a week students can meet in a computer lab and work in SL. They could build a gym, and post fitness goals on its walls. Also, there are many web sites out there that they could use to calculate calories in and calories out. Just a thought... Great article. ;)

Here is an interesting letter from an associate professor of physics at Elon University about his experience with using Second Life in his courses. He seems to really enjoy using new creative tools in his courses and is constantly looking for new ways to do things. He has tried many different representations of virtual reality. In general, he had assumed that all of his students would be fairly technically competent, especially in building in Second Life, but found that most of them fumbled around at first. Once they got on to it, they did quite well. He also took part in the Second Life Planetarium that has already been mentioned by one of the other students.

RezzMania is a blog dedicated to the builders of Second Life who create amazing virtual structures, clothes, skins, tools, and organizing events and contests. A particular blog post that caught my eye was Vito, the Dogfather: http://rezzmania.com/2009/12/vito-the-dogfather.html Like myself, Vito was a martial artist and dog trainer but unfortunately, he was a victim in a horrific traffic accident and spent 5½ weeks in a coma and ended up with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury). One of his forms of rehabilitation was creating a group for victims of TBI in Second Life. Vito now runs a dojo and trains dogs in SL. His SL group is staffed with a real life physician and a rehab therapist acting as consultants for the rest of the group.

This is a very recent post regarding the integration of current events in education, by means of Second Life. The article specifically describes how high school teachers have created an oil spill in Second Life and are having students think of ways to control this environmental nightmare. Creating real life problem in Second Life enriches the manner in which students interact with news. This type of work leads me to believe that many aspects of a student's development can be worked at the same time! More bang for the buck! These teachers do however, have he economic and technical support from the city of New York.

Virtual Med School? Ok, maybe not quite yet, although this blog post by Clare Linden shares an interview with Dave Taylor from Imperial College London regarding the use of SL as a tool for teaching medical procedures before trying them out on actual patients. Apparently Dave Taylor also built the NPL pavilion for the International Spaceflight Museum in SL as well. The virtual hospital, Second Health, was developed to provide lower-cost simulations of medical devices and help decrease incidents of errors in clinical settings. There are day surgery centers, a "keeping healthy showcase," and a really cool teleporter, reminiscent of Star Trek so you don't have to walk/fly to find things. Some areas are off limits, but there are plenty of things for the public to see. I'm interested in creating something along these lines for health care in a different setting. Blog site: http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/workinginworld/blog/2009/06/01/the-future-of-healthcare-3-questions-for-dave-taylor-of-imperial-college-london SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Second%20Health%20London/131/223/25

I found this YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGMH_1VnnaY) about a virtual museum exhibit created by teens. It showcases "Kristallnacht," or "The Night of Broken Glass" from the holocaust. Teens from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. worked with teens from New York and museum staff via Skype, SL, & phone (sound familiar, COMETEERs?) to discuss issues, storyboard, and even create a design document (future COMETEERs!) to create the exhibit in SL. Interestingly, it seems that the build was done by an SL company called "Digital Refinery," "...an all teen in-world development company," headed by a 15 year old CEO. Teens visiting the site are placed in the role of an investigative reporter in order to find out what people did during Kristallnacht. They can click on cutouts of people to get information and learn about the choices that ordinary people faced during this event. Visitors also observe the environment; broken storefront windows, a before & after Kristallnacht replica of a synagogue, and just general destruction of the Jewish community. When they are done, they reflect, discuss and write about what they have seen & learned, and post notecards to share their experiences. I love that this is all built by teens, but that they also had to work with adults in RL to learn how to cooperate and communicate intelligently. I am big on making history interactive, otherwise it just seems boring to many kids. SL holds so much potential for this sort of activity; time for textbook companies to look into this instead of making ridiculously expensive, environmentally unfriendly textbooks that bore kids to tears. Ok, I know I'm dreaming, after all, if the textbooks weren't expensive, those companies would go out of business. Hmm.