This class got up and running faster than our previous one. I think most of us are at least getting more comfortable in SL. Voice continues to be a problem for me. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. Actually, I always get the voice, just not through the headphones. I really want to nail that down. I feel this is a vital skill to have if I ever expect to provide professional development in SL.

This class featured a guest speaker Gus Plisskin/Fred Fuchs from FibreSabre Consulting. He informed us on how we could, as educators use the SL Teen Grid with students. SL has incredible security for keeping adults off of the Teen Grid. He emphasized that if an adult tried to get an account on SL, Linden Labs goes as far as contacting the FBI and report your attempt.

While I considered what of Gus had to say pretty much an infomercial I found it extremely informative. So much so, that when I encountered a Noobie at the ISTE Headquarters looking for Esme on Sunday morning, I was able to tell her things about the Teen Grid and its accessiblity by adults. We even became friends and I promised to email her how to contact Fred which I will do today once I have time.

In the meantime, I have contacted Fred and made inquiries about getting on the Teen Grid. I believe I will get another avatar as suggested and try to participate in an already up and running project in the Teen Grid before I ever consider the purchase of land, etc for my district. I think I can swallow a $2000.00 expense next year. But, before I make this expediture I need to know exactly what project it is and the logistics of completing it with a group of students. I also need to find a teacher willing to take this kind of leap. This possibly may be an after school activity that I organize and work with a teacher to provide.

After Fred left we took a break and then we went into hell mode. Esme had plans for us to break into groups, based on how comfortable we were in SL and the idea of building. We were sent off in different directions to view videos and try to build. Other already more accomplished builders and SLers went with Esme to do an activity around education in SL, I think.

Esme was not gone long! Several frustrated builders were freaking out, include me in the pack. The easy video, building a holiday box, was not showing on the correct screen. We were watching how to make a flag that waves. That is a joke. I couldn’t build the flag pole much less a flag that waves in the wind. We were then led to another video screen but that one showed the same video.

Oh thank you, thank you Eru for being a patient teacher. She helped me and I cannot remember who right now complete our boxes. I will have to go back through the notecard for the class to remember who my equally frustrated partner was. I am still having difficulty with our duel identities. What a lesson in perseverance that was! But we managed to complete our holiday boxes and make it back to the wrap up of class in time.

Esme, as usual, had more planned for us than we could complete. There is a SLOODLE box hanging our there that has me quite curious and a quiz in the forums I am reluctant to take.

Right now what I want to learn the most is how to run a video and ppt on a whiteboard. I feel that will be a very useful skill if I ever want to provide pd in SL for teachers. The verdict is out as to if I will EVER want to build anything in SL. But, I need to practice those skill to be able to make and informed rather than infirmed decision on that one.

PS Subsequent posts in the forums has given some tips on voice in SL. I plan to try them out shortly to try and nail that skill down. I have been a little lax in my work this fortnight as there was the last few days of school and a trip out of town to visit family for a long weekend.

I have started to visit some of the sites on Beth Konkhe’s list of recommended educational sites in SL. I went to Bowling Green State University Virtual Camput

Slurl 117/176/26

Right at the front gate it says it is a violence free zone. I roamed around for awhile. I discovered that as the description Beth had provided that this was a resource for the faculty and students of Bowling Green. Faculty can set up office hours, have private residences, hold classes but nothing I could particularly use other than the ideas for how to use SL for an academic organization office building.

Because of the heat I decided to take a dip in the water fountain out front to cool off.

I then went to EdTech Island sponsored by Boise State University. The welcome center was pretty unassuming, but what a find! There are plenty of resources here. What a place to learn about teaching in SL! I spent about 2 hours just exploring this Island. It is fantastic. I also managed to pick up a FREE teacher resource kit that I cannont wait to go to Lighthouse Learning Island and start to unpack it. Here are some pictures of EdTech Island.

Okay, so what is a MMOLE?

Some of the topics we have covered were also topics at EdTech.

Belonging.

Safety and security/Knowing if someone is truly a friend

The benefits of gaming in VWs

Do you think that Boise got the idea for the scavenger hunts from Esme to learn about how to get around in SL?

A podcast in SL….I need to learn how to do this.

Blogging in Education…Both Boise and Bowling Green had set up blogging for teachers and students

I highly recommend a visit to EdTech Island
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I have also signed up in Google Groups to be a SL DEN member. I will be receiving daily emails from then.

I raced home from work (had an early evening event), ate a quick dinner and made it to the DEN Theater just in time for Cal Kjeller, DEN Star Educator, presentation on advanced features in the Discovery Education Network. This is a subscription that my district has been demoing for a few months. My teachers love it and really want us to subscribe next year.

What an experience! First, Beth was there again and we IM, she was trying to set up to tape the event so I did not want to bother her again. For once all of my equipment was working purrrfectly, audio was loud and clear. All of a sudden Kinsey comes online, we chat and she wants to come to the meeting. (She asks to be teleported but instead of my teleporting her, she teleports me. LOL. In the meantime, Eru shows up and wants to join in. (I had referred to Kinsey as a he, Eru pointed out Kinsey is a he. I IM…don’t have my cheat sheet I carry with SL and RL names. We all get a laugh. Well, I managed to teleport her too. Kinsey was having difficulty with audio and I tried to help but really wanted to listen to the features in DEN for my teachers to use with students to enhance the video experience. Once again the multi-tasking is going on at a pretty fierce pace.

I had never spent enough time in DEN to know how truly robust it is. My experience had been the same as many of my teachers. Grab a video clip and be done. Now I have more to learn to share with colleagues.

At the end of the hour, we clap, (I clapped too) and Cal thanks us for coming. Beth say she got the audio. Cal says he will post slideshow to slideshare or to a Google group some of the others must belong to. I will contact Beth in RL and get it. The slideshow will be extremely helpful for my going back to learn the extended features of DEN.

Last night showed me the power of inworld communication and collaboration. This is very exciting.

I snapped a picture of Eru and I before we logged off.

Esme suggested that we arrive at MCGC sandbox a little early to make sure we were ready to go on time. I discovered to everyone’s pain as that there was something very wrong with my audio. This took some time out of class but not much.

We had a very full schedule for the day. Two activities as teams that had been already created and also a meeting with someone to talk to us about the Teen Grid of SL. Our group has had much discussion over the past two weeks about definitely not wanting young students in SL and whether there should just be an educational grid only for teaching purposes. I am inclined to agree with Esme that SL holds much for adults, that might not fit into the realm of education so access to both is good. The speaker never showed so we spent the entire class on the two activities. Actually, I am glad he did not because the class was very productive.

Activity 1 set four of us Micina, Text and Kinsey off to four locations to investigate in SL. We met before taking off and took our assignments. We needed a Photographer, Writer, Project Manager and Communicator/Fact finder. We were to go to each site and evaluate it educational value. This was great since I am going to go to all of Beth Kohnke’s recommended sites in the next two weeks now I have a criteria to work from to evaluate these sites. I had planned on doing some research on the Internet to see what others used for evaluation criteria but now I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Our fist stop was Space Station…We next went to ….and finally … In the time allotted there was no way we could get to all four. There was just not time. We went back to MCGC and because our speaker did not show we were able to report back about our findings. I managed to get the notecards to Text, Micina and Kinsey. Of course I learned later all I had to do was drop it on their avatar. I had been using the method of opening their profile and dropping the card into there. Another trick I learned today.

The following is what was wriiten on the notecards:

Text Pamet Kinsey Micina

International Spaceflight Museum

Takes you to
Rocket Ring
Cape Canaveral
Hubble Space Telescopte
Planetarium

Many other sites you will see on the large bulletin board. You can teleport to each location check it out and return to go to other locations. Pure navigational ease of use particularly for newbies

Gallery of Reflexive Architecture
Useless for any of us.

The Healing Pool
hunger management therapy
exercise equipment
pretty
soothing
ride a swan

We were really rushed. So there was probably more to see but we had to get a move on.

The balance of the class, after we shared our individual findings, was to learn to build. I had not built anything yet and at first had major difficulties. I was able to create the box but could do nothing with it as far as a texture goes. The task was to take a photograph which I learned had to be a .jpg (I always use .gif due to it is the smallest compression size for the web) and put it on my box. By the time I finished hopping back and forth between photoshop and keeping track of what was going on in SL I was getting pretty frustrated along with the fact that slow but sure I was losing more and more SL capabilities. By the time I could no longer even send a text message. I finally quit out, logged in again and managed to add my photo to my box no problem. Between the screeching of my audio and losing capabilities in SL I felt completely overwhelmed and totally incompetent. During our next brief break I managed to resolve the audio. It is very hard trying to manage it all at once.

Building with Rosalita, Verbena and Shailey was fun. I managed to pick up some tips from them. We built some strange shapes.

Esme reminded us after we finished building to clean up after ourselves so I am going to go in now and delete what I made. She also told us about returning items to people who leave them around. That explains two returned items to my inventory last week, one from Esme and one from Kathy Dryburgh.

At the end of class Esme gave us some things for our inventory. Which by the way I need to organize before it gets totally out of control.

So today I had many new experiences in SL:

• working on a team
• using or not using audio and potential troubleshooting
• correct format for textures
• to pick up after myself
• go with the flow if I am having trouble.

Phew

Last evening I attended a Discovery Education Network (DEN) event. This event was held for prospective DEN Star Educators. I am in the process of applying for Star Educator status and SL Beth Konkhe is my sponsor.

I arrived at the event promptly at 4 PM SLT. Riptide Furse, lead administrator for DEN, was conducting the meeting. He was using audio. It was 7:20 before everryone got voice except me. That took until 7:50. It was chair to keyboard interface on my part why the voice did not work, so I cannot complain. I missed the obvious, my sound control button. Duh.

However, I did have a very interesting experience. Talk about multi-tasking. Between trying to IM Beth for help, reading the comments by others and trying to get the voice to work; I was all over the place. I did manage to follow what Riptide was saying because he had an interactive whiteboard outlining the application process.

I felt like I had my first experience with understanding the online life of today’s teens. They are instant messaging with friends, playing an online game and doing their homework at the same time. You have to be pretty quick to keep up. Talk about multi-sensory perceptions! I was getting audio, video and text communications all at once. I actually had two text conversations going on at one time.

I do have a suggestion for our class and anyone who is going to use audio in their meetings. Much time is wasted getting audio up and running. If in the future audio is to be used, come to class early and make sure your equipment is up and running so the event can start on time. What a waste of prime time.

I am not going to make my decision regarding the use of audio for a few more days. I want to jump in with Esme and say, “audio sucks,” but actually in class the other day I found it reassuring to listen to the voice for instruction. I am sure this is a throw back to the traditional classroom. So for me the jury is still out.

I want to relay what Beth said to me last night about her participation in DEN in SL. She has made many friends, has a new network of people to ask for opinions and assistance and collaborates all the time.

At this time, I am eager to attend more events and will take my own advice and have my equipment up and running before the event starts.

I will tell you about the island that I own in conjunction with Nauset, Plymouth and Barnstable School Districts. Plymouth is the only one not on Cape Cod but it is very close and the Tech Director there used to be in Barnstable so we have stayed in contact. We used Enhancing Education Through Technology grant funds to purchase the island. So far it has mostly been built by Kathy Dryburgh of Nauset. My building is pretty empty and I hope to learn the skills in this class to furnish it and begin to use it with teachers for professional development.

Kathy is also trying to get us into the Teen Grid but is meeting with some resistance from Linden. We meet next Tuesday so I will know much more by then.

Below are a few picture I took yesterday so you get a sense of what the island looks like. Kathy has sold off some of our unused space…I will be learning about that next week as well. I think Adobe may be setting up shop on the island tool.

I will be keeping you posted on the changes I make to LLI

Pamet