I have been playing around in Second Life for the last few days and am having a difficult time of it. My 18 year old daughter tells me she tried it for a while and thought it was complicated as well. I entered a few educational environments. I explored several international destinations. There seems to be a lot of content and it is a very creative looking environment. I had a hard time figuring out how to make changes in the appearance of my avatar, and the basic operation of the avatar in each environment. There seemed to be a lot of folks just standing around. I think it will require a big time investment to understand the possibilities but from the research I did, I know that many universities use Second Life and are very successful in doing so. I can see it offers collaboration possibilities. You can interact with other educators around the world, as well as classrooms and laboratories.
As far as how Second Life could be used in and ELA setting I see many writing and reading opportunities. Students can write and perform plays, poetry and music. Students can create and respond to writing prompts and reflect on experiences in virtual worlds. Students can participate in historic reenactments and "live" in other times. For the foreign language classroom, Second Life can offer language immersion experiences. In the science classroom, students can perform virtual experiments, explore the human body and organs from the inside and collaborate on experiments with anyone in the world. Second Life offers these and many more possibilities for learning.
I believe to truly experience the possibilities I would need a real purpose- perhaps a class or lecture to attend. As with any new software application I never really learn it until I have something concrete to accomplish.
I really like the idea of having students perform plays, poetry, and music with thier avatars. I agree that in order to fully use this tool I would need to be trained. I had a hard time using SL.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is a lot going on in this virtual world and it can be difficult to sift through everything. When being used as an educational tool, I would highly recommend that the teacher creates a learning environment on Second Life that is very structured because I know that most students have a very short attention span and would wonder off into various places without some form of structure. I share that concern with you because I found myself exploring for a long time with little direction.
ReplyDeleteKim, i agree with a lot of the things you had to say here. When i was walking around and experimenting with Second Life i had trouble doing some of the different commands as well. For instance i couldn't fly because Mac computers do not have the "page up" button. Also my computer was very laggy because of a bandwidth issue i assume. Otherwise though i think SL could be very beneficial as a collaborative tool like you said. I think it would indeed take some time to learn but i could see some students really thriving in this atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteYour avatar looks great! Yes I agree that the learning activity needs to be structured to reinforce the positive experience in the SL environment, assuming every student has the capacity to run SL smoothly. :D
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