This is so useful! I was looking at another educator's profile when I saw this pick: Entes, Sunrise Mountain, Tupi (147, 149, 303) and had to go see it. I have to work this into a VSTE meeting soon. It seems that avatars can answer an opinion question by standing in a bin that says, Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree and the tool will count them and give percentages. What a fun way to take a survey!
I'm on vacation, as most of you are, and I'm doing some things around the house, but not killing myself at it. Mostly I'm doing what I want to be doing and a lot of that is in my virtual world, Second Life. This morning, reading the SLED listserv postings, which I rarely have time to do, I came across a post by William Magee. I will paste it here in it's entirety because it so completely describes what SL can be for education. I wish I could be this elegant in sharing what SL is to my friends, colleagues, and family who still do not "get it."
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Bill Magee (Wam7c Macchi) Second Life is a simulator for encouraging the imagination, a playground for nourishing the creative process, and a blank canvas for inspiring innovation. Very few Real Life schools can make these claims. Compared to the lackluster cubes in which we educate our children, Second Life is the outside of the educational box. Here is just a partial list of the capabilities of Second Life as an educational platform: ACTIVITY CENTERS Art studio* Experiment modeling* Project design modeling* Visualization studio** Seminar classroom* Conference center* Meeting space* Remote office hours** Language-learning facility* LSL programming environment** Community-building* Socialization and recreation areas* RESOURCES Museum* Library* Project Poster and Demo center* Student projects laboratory* Student projects display center* Construction facility** Holodeck** INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Database retrieval system Powerpoint presentation display* Slide projector* RSS-feed receiver Remote connection to Moodle learning-management system** MULTIMEDIA streaming audio and video player. machinima production studio* movie theater web browser COMMUNICATIONS instant messaging and peer-to-peer text communicator email client VOIP-enabled international voice communication system* * Second Life provides this function at lower cost than common tools and facilities. ** This function is unique to Second Life.
