Augmented Reality Language Learning

Today I've attended a very interesting presentation and discussion about augmented reality and language learning. Dennis Newson kindly invited all members of Osnagroup in VWLL and Webheads to his villa at EduNation in Second Life. The presentation was given by Howard Vickers/Howie Yoshikawa, who already blogged about his ideas: http://www.avatarlanguages.com/blog/arll/, which I found very interesting.
There was a group of very interesting people at Dennis's villa, Howie's presentation was thought-provoking, I was glad I decided to attend and I am going to write about it tomorrow. It's too late now.

Time Machine Lesson

I've just read about a beautiful idea for a lesson plan. It's a lesson in writing and it could be done with students on different levels of English, excellent for teenagers, but also for adults.

Seth Dickens had this idea for the last class ever with his students. He asked them to send him a "Time Machine" email that they will be able to read only in five years' time. He'd set a blog for them for that purpose.

He asked them to reflect on the past years in high school, to write about what they thought they would be doing in five years' time, what they thought their classmates would be doing and to leave a message for the whole class to read in five years time.
He added his students' emails to the blog's Email Notifications service and posted the students' emails. He scheduled their post to appear in exactly five years.

I think the idea is brilliant and only have to check how to make posts appear at a certain point in the future,not immediately.

Seth also mentioned http://www.futureme.org/ , which does the same but for individual users. You can write a letter to your future self and schedule it to get to your email on a date in the future. It looks like fun. I've decided to try a version of Time Machine lesson with my students. This last week of the school year looks like the right time for this kind of activity. Thanks Seth!