Second Life in Education

Last night I had the opportunity to participate in an Elluminate session by Kevin Jarrett and Dean Groom on Second Life in education. My past experience with second life has been entering ISTE island and rather wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do next. I attended an excellent session at NECC last year by Kathy Schrock and was very excited with seeing how she is using it for professional development with her staff. She also showed some excellent islands for student learning. I attended an ISTE webinar early in the fall but never took any next steps.Tonight's session gave me excellent resources and motivation to take those next steps. Below are my notes from the session last night.

Second Life is a virtual world, multi-user environment that has become quite popular for educators the past couple of years. It continues to grow stronger each year. If you’re interested in learning more about it, here is a one-hour webinar session done by Kevin Jarrett and Dean Groom.

Videos to learn about value of second life in education, about 9 minutes each. Suggested to be the videos to show to group of teachers if you are looking at starting second life.
http://tinyurl.com/dn8gmf
http://tinyurl.co/db7oph

Some great islands in SL
Resource for curriculum in Second Life
Slideshow describing SL in 3600 seconds

2 Grids
Adult Grid – Must be FBI background checked to work there.
Teen Grid – Must be 13- 17, have to have a parent with credit card authorize your account (Clearance process)

100% user directed and controlled. No scoring or leveling up. Best experienced with a gaming capable computer. NOT recommended on a wireless network. Keyboarding skills are critical.

Not a game. An environment “ready to use”. Main grid is not 100% safe. There are bad places in SL just as on the Internet. The teen grid is very restricted. A teen can create an account on the adult grid. So student/parent must be educated to understand this and the difference between using at school with guidance versus at home.

10% of the people that do stay— as far as the educational space are creative, smart, funny, people from all over the world.

Peggy Sheehy – EXCELLENT resource for using SL in education.
Peggy's new blog site and her Peggy's Old blog

Full list of virtual worlds
Second Life Curriculum site
Virtual Worlds Best Practice blog
Video archived session from Dean

SL Event Calendar

7 Things You Should Know About Second Life – Excellent article to share with peers and students

Ohio Unversity Second Life Campus
Ants in Second Life: A Simulation
Introduction to Second Life
Global Kids Islands (Teen SL)
Global Kids Social Issue Machinima (Teen SL)
Internatinal School Island

Example Teen Grid Projects:
Global Kids Island, Youtopia Island, KidsConnect, LearnWay Island, Eye4You Alliance, Oz Island, Ramapo Islands, Schome Park, The PacRimXIslands, Schome Park, The PacRimX Islands, MATRIX Learning, The Ohio STEAM Island, Accelerate Nation
Peter --- will give access to Schome Park for FREE
SL: Educators Working With Teens

Brilliant Guide from Peggy. Step by step guide to getting started.

Sat 8PM – ISTE island meetings, casual meet-ups of educators
Tues nights 8 PM – ISTE events – scheduled speakers

Great Island for Educators! Friendly, visually appealing, great resources
Jokaydia – Jokay Wollongong
Web: http://jokaydia.com/

http://tinyurl.com/njplpsl (to get an avatar)
http://tinyurl.com/jokaydia (if you have one now)
April 10th 8 PM EDT – All are welcome! Follow up event! Join in.

Software download is here.