VSTE Executive Director Spoke April 23

Monday, April 23, 2012, Witchyrichy Witherspoon, AKA Dr. Karen Richardson spoke at our general meeting to share "What [She] Learned at VSTE" this year. She told about mini-conferences, webinars, SL meetings, and conferences she's attended as the ED of VSTE. It's mind boggling how much VSTE members are into. You can't help learning if you hang around this group!

Proud of JMU

Today I arranged for the teacher recertification class from UVA Wise to have a tour of the James Madison University campus, or simulation, in SL. It was awesome! Lykopis Darkstone, who is a professor there and built the sims, lead the tour. She showed us three areas: the theater, Stonehenge, and living quarters for students and professors living and learning abroad in Florence, Italy.

Landing spot with Wilson Hall in the background

Lobby of the JMU Theater

 

Inside the theater
Leko Littlebird has painstakingly recreated the actual theater

Leko uses this space to create scene design virtually before building it in real life, saving money, time and materials. His students have space in skyboxes to do building as well.

Lykopis' own students have several assignments in SL. One is at Stonehenge. They walk through a green space clicking gems for notecards which provide information about the 10000 year old Neolithic site. Once inside they learn even more. She's built it precisely as it was when whole including the sunlight from the correct direction at sunset at the winter solstice.

JMU Study Abroad space in Florence, Italy

Some lucky faculty, graduate students, and undergrads get to spend three months in this space. The house they live and study in while in the physical world is a maze of narrow halls, small rooms, and gated stairways. Visiting this space in SL first, helps them get their barrings and prepare for their experience in Italy. Faculty traveling with family get a realistic look at how small the space is, helping them not to over pack!

Chapter 6

We have been reviewing a chapter a week of Austen Rae's book and I'm pleased that on week six we still have about a dozen dedicated participants. I took this shot because Orange Planer, a dragon, sat beside me most of the time, while an owl, Elphaba Helendale, sat near Austen. You never know what you will see in SL. We had a lively discussion about students writing historical fiction and becoming so excited Austen had two different related multimedia projects going on at once in her classroom!

Chapter 3 Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?

This week we talked about using multimedia. In her book, Julie D. Ramsay talks about how the children attended an ISTE Webinar for teachers about digital storytelling and became so excited they wanted to create digital stories of their own. Students wrote about famous people from history and told how our lives would be different today if those people had not ever lived.

This session was not as well attended. All the other VSTE facilitators were busy with PTA open houses or had no power still from a recent hurricane. It's not our regular meeting night anyway. Attendees felt like a lot of teachers were busy with the beginning of school. We agreed to continue meeting Thursday nights as planned, with additional advertising this week.

Chapter 1 of Book Study "Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?" by Julie D Ramsay

21 members attended including several CRSs from Virginia Beach, teachers from all over the country and Deeds David from China! One VBCPS principal was in attendance. Back channel was active and Austen Rae did a great job of answering our questions.

Movie by Cyrus Hush

Math Apps Night on VSTE Islan

 We had a nice night sharing math apps with Jazmemo facilitating. A document was started on Google Docs that we will continue to fill in as we meet more and share apps for each subject.

VSTE Celebrates Octoberfest

Alfredo planned this meeting

We started with the polka on VSTE Island

We visited several German sims, beer stein in hand.

We rode rides.

danced

in conga lines

shot ourselves out of a canon

and had a great time!

Spiff Whitfield at VSTE

Monday night at our VSTE meeting, Spiff Whitfield spoke to us about Virtual Pioneers.
Spiff showed slides of some of the more meaningful events the Virtual Pioneers have had over the past year. He changed historical costumes during his talk, his trademark. In this photo he is sharing a visit with Fanny Starr, a Holocaust survivor.
Virtual Pioneers is without a doubt the most successful educational group I've been a part of outside of ISTE itself. VSTE and DEN also do a great job, but there is something about VP. I remember at the beginning being annoyed at some of the things that happened routinely but those things were growing pains issues: introducing everyone every week, not starting and stopping on time, meetings about meetings. VSTE has been through those things too. It seems to be a part of establishing a basis for a group. Now, however, VP has a steady following and the meetings are consistently every two weeks and full of information that not only teachers appreciate, but all people who want to know and understand more about the world we live in and the people in it. Hats off to Spiff, a very smart, unpretentious, accommodating man! You've done a great job!

Big Things Happening!

Now let's see. It has been suggested that I blog about this process but I've been told it's secret. Hmm. What to say... There have been some interesting meetings including a face to face with Danny, Executive Director of VSTE, and Barrie, his Professional Development Director. Janene, Al, Marie, and Lisa were there. We met at the School Admin Building to talk about our desire to do a conference session about Second Life at VSTE in February and have some power to upgrade the VSTE building and perhaps get more land and prims. We also wanted some authority in the VSTE group so we could send notices and get members together for events. What we got was much more! We are not doing a session in Virginia Beach's conference room at VSTE, but we are doing about seven sessions, some repeated, in an area that will be set up for us at VSTE highlighting Second Life. We will do a special event Monday night, which will be a surprise, and we got much more than we anticipated. VBCPS Dept of Tech and VSTE are being amazingly supportive of us, too. I can't say how, exactly, another secret, but we are awed by the gift of approval Janene shared last night. We also met inworld with Milosun (Ross), Flying (Danny), and WitchyRichy (Karen) at different times in the last couple of days. We are learning about the history of VSTE in SL, the vision the board has for the future of VSTE in SL, and making sure our Executive Director's appearance in SL is in keeping with what we expect of him! His purple sneakers are to die for! So here we go! Our plans for VSTE, and possibly ISTE, are beyond what we thought we'd be doing. We have a lot of people to contact and a lot of building to do. I will try to keep track of it here, as much for myself as for anyone else who is interested. Thank you, Lisa, for the photo!