Comments on: Do You Use Second Life or other Virtual Worlds With Your Students?

By: haylzvg

haylzvg — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:40:55 +0000

Thankyou to everyone for all your helpful comments

By: Nik Peachey

Nik Peachey — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:42:48 +0000

I wrote an articel a way back on designing task and materials for Second life based on my experiences of creatng a business English coure:http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2007/06/materials-design-for-virtual-worlds.html

Also more recently I wrote some suggestions on how to create photo assignments in SL.
http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/08/photo-assignments-for-efl-esl-students.html

Hope these are useful

Best

Nik Peachey

By: AngelaC

AngelaC — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:03:36 +0000

Hi Hayley,

I have a group of students working in Quest Atlantis (QA). They range from grades 5 to 8, and are spread around the state. They are highly able students, who need extension and challenge.

Because there is an enormous range of quality curriculum tasks (quests, missions and units) already created, it is possible to link the QA activities in with classroom priorities, or the student’s area of ability or interest. A recent feature is for teachers to be able to amend activities to make them more relevant to individual requirements.

QA has the reward features of gaming, combined with the social and relationship building capacity of Web 2.0, and is intrinsically motivating and engaging.

For my students an important element is that they can look at all quests, and then negotiate having specific quests made available to them. This means they can have ownership over their learning, and can move into new areas through negotiation.

Other teachers who have a different cohort of students have made mention of the way in which students achieve at a much higher level in QA than in their F2F classes, and how the learning becomes applied to the F2F world.

By: Second Life and Education | Haylzinnnovation

Second Life and Education | Haylzinnnovation — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:08 +0000

[...] Sue – I’m still building up my network and learning about Second Life. Can you ask your networks if they can share their thoughts on Second Life with students? Uncategorized | Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!) [...]

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By: Librarians Matter » Blog Archive » Susan Greenfield: people of the book vs people of the screen

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:17:32 +0000

[...] was very, very heartened yesterday to read Sue Water’s account of a project that Dean Groom in Sydney is conducting with his Year 9 class. To me it epitomised how [...]

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By: Hayley

Hayley — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:31:19 +0000

Sorry everyone, this is my blog address:
http://www.haylzvg.edublogs.org

By: Hayley

Hayley — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:29:07 +0000

Hi Lauren, thanks for your comment. It really helps getting feedback from others on how we as teachers can use second life (or other virtual worlds) in the classroom. I was just wondering though, how do you and Dean Groom monitor the students and what they are actually doing?

By: Lauren O'Grady

Lauren O'Grady — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:53:23 +0000

Hello,
I currentluy am working out of the classroom so haven’t used virtual world with my own students but I have been working with Dean Groom’s students on their machinima project. I think the benefit of using vitural worlds is the depth of immersion that it offers and the challenge of creating in a 3d environment. That has been the biggest learning curve for me. I have never done anything in relation to design and the building in virtual worlds stretches me out of my comfort zone.
The challenges of virtual worlds is the bandwidth and the speed you can work in there especially when you have a crowd in the world. I would check out the second classroom ning for more information.
Cheers
lauren