April 25, 2009

Second Life

Every Friday the members of SLexperiments group in SL meet to share new ideas, lesson plans, show some new tools they have discovered or just to chat with friends and have a good time.

Yesterday Daffodil showed some of her new ideas for her lesson on Monday and we tried them to see how they worked.
As usual, Daffodil made a good job and produced some very interesting activities for her students. I especially liked the vocabulary exercise in which she produced boxes from the inventory, the boxes had phrases the students had to match them with various cattegories.
The best part was when she made the activity fun by making the boxes physical and allowing students to kick and move them into the fields with the names of the cattegories.
I wish I could design a similar acitity in RL, not to mention what fun it would be to drag it from an inventory whenever I want and be sure it works.
Teaching in SL gives so many more opportunities for relaxed learning where students can change the place where they learn and not be in the classroom all the time, or they can move, chat and learn much more through doing.

Later, Daffodil and Carol taught Osna, Dorka and me how to create a scene that can be used for teaching. We tried a simple one consisting of a rug and two cushions.



I was very proud of myself when I managed to change the script, record the position of the objects and put my lovely scene into my lovely pink box and then the box into the inventory. I took it out of the inventory without a problem.
That means that you can build any scene you need for your lesson, add any objects you need, and you can produce it in a second from the inventory any time you need. That's wonderful.

Later at night there was a very interesting meeting at Dennis's villa - Osnagroup extra meeting. Unfortunately, Iffaf had to postpone her lecture because of some technical problems Dennis had yesterday, but we had a very interesting conversation. Dennis, Iffaf, Carol and me were present, and Nahir and Mary joined later.
I learned a lot about the differences between virtual worlds like SL, Twinity, Reaction Grid, Wonderland, Metaverse, etc. A few months ago I didn't even know any of these existed. Now I'm learning why different teachers and teacher trainers prefer one over the others.

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