Week4, Blog #7-Second Life

Learning in Second Life would probably shock the socks off our students. They are so used to entering a room, opening a book, and reading as a group, that if they were asked to open a computer and go to a site called Second Life and create their own Avatar, they wouldn't know what to do!

I do agree that places like ISTE Island in Second Life could be benefitial to learning. The teacher would need to have a great deal of knowledge about the site. I can envision a teacher creating three avatars representing him or herself, and holding groups sessions with the students in this site. The ISTE site had a multitude of meeting palces, some more specific than others. But a Language Arts teacher could hold group meetings: one to discuss literature, one grammar,etc. and so on, all in second life, and all relevant to student learning. I would have liked to visit Eduisland, but for some reason I was told it no longer existed.

I think my only issue with secon life is that it is so much fun, studetns would want to be flying and battleing in the air all the time the class was there. Also, I would need to learn more about the differnt sites before I brought my students there. I believe we could trust sites like the ISTE, but maybe not so much sites that were set up by people in general.

In our second month of school, we had to explore Second Life and decide upon a section to report on to the others in the class. Our group chose Ecology as our project and I was to report on Etopia Eco Villiage. Which is agin, a nice site to explore, but the teacher could have considerable out put of funds to make this workable in the classroom. Below is a picture from Second Life Etopia Eco Villiage.

This viliage is easy to explore, they have interesting areas to visited, such as the one above that shows a peacock and horses hanging around a watering trough. There are also special events that are advertised throughout the park-like villiage. Once agin, though, the teacher would need extensive knowledge of the site and its attributes before embarking on a classroom visit to the site.