Likert Scale

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!

From William Magee via the SLED Listserv Dec. 30, 2009

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."

---------------------------------

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.

The Meeting House

Identity Euler is an avatar/person who needs a portfolio to be a builder for hire. I found her through the SLED listserv when she asked for building projects. We have asked her to do several projects for us. This is the 1607 Meeting House. It's going to be larger than scale because we want to hold actual meetings in there and not have our cameras go nuts. She's doing an awesome job of contacting Mandie and me to let us check her progress. Once again Mandie has the vision better than I do. I've also asked Identity to do the furniture and fireplace for the HQ building.

Merry Christmas!

This was fun. Several CRSs and four of the ITCs worked at the ATC December 22 and 23 since our buildings were closed and we were required to work. We worked on getting the ITCs up to speed in our virtual world for the upcoming VSTE conference. This was taken the last moment we were together, and it does not include everyone who was there, but Merry Christmas from, left to right: Joan, Marie, Charlie, Kim, Al, Bill, ??, Lloyd, and Janene. ?? = if someone remembers who that was, I'll fix it! Sorry!!

So far behind

These posts are all just to get some photos uploaded in some sort of order. I will write the blogs when I'm not so tired. What a busy time!

Virtual Pioneers Dec. 21st

What an awesome night! We started with a meeting where Spiff taught us to add URLs to a kiosk that we could place in SL. When visitors click it they will receive a notecard with our suggestions for URLs to social studies sites. It was oral but I was helping a newbie without voice. I had to listen to Spiff, follow his directions, and type them to my friend. She didn't have the right tag on so none of the directions were working for her. It was frustrating but I learned something. After the meeting we went to Avalon Castle where the owner hosted an 18th century dance for us. It happened to be my birthday and Louise invited a lot of my friends who are not members of Virtual Pioneers. We danced 18th century line dances for an hour! Everyone came dressed in period costume. I felt like I was living Pride and Prejudice!

Winterfaire

It seems Second Life is always having some sort of world wide celebration. In the fall it was something about fire life light... I don't remember, but now it's Winterfaire. Winterfaire seems to be all about snow and snowmen and iceskating. I wear skates most of the time now because every spare minute my friend, Cyrus, wants to explore another Winterfaire sim. For once I'm getting into it myself. I've been introduced to several sims I'd not otherwise visit. One was about accepting customs of people from other cultures. You can take a quiz to see how familiar you are with the cutomes and you get an immediate score. I'm sad to say I did not do well on any that I took, including the one on United States.