second life

2nd life was a fun experience for me, and a little unexpected.It does involve some hand to eye coordination, and in that respect for me it's a bit like my tennis, sometimes very good then not so good.


I didn't actually choose to be female, and that may have been a mistake because people kept walking quickly past me! Then I tried to change my gender later with little success. I do think all this fiddling about with appearance and clothing a waste of time though educationally. Yes, I agree it could be used for language learning, but all I saw were reading billboards, and that's not particularly interactive. The best thing would be to set up a private island or lab for learning. The other drawback is the amount of flirting etc. I followed a couple of avatars and they started kissing-it was a horrible, slurping sound, and I felt quite uncomfortable, and had to reverse out of the way, just like in real life!!!
As for 'Cancerland' for education-please...?!!!As an ex nurse, this is sending out totally the wrong message. I thought it was dreadful, some woman bleating on about being frightened about her thyroid cancer. What does that hope to achieve? It smacks of reality TV, and all that sensationalism; not suitable at all. This does however highlight the importance of teachers being involved in the development of virtual reality 'sets' for education.

Google Lit Trip for English literature or Language Classes

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Similar to veronica's idea, you could use a GoogleLit trip where books have more than one location in the content, but not all books would be suitable for this. Divide the class into groups for each chapter and get each group to either describe the location, add URLs and images relevant to the setting or story, write vocabulary questions or give word meanings and provide discussion starters for class based discussion on the reading. I think the discussion starters are great for getting the children involved in the discussion as they had to think of the ideas themselves. I tried an example from The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, but I could not get the image up unfortunately as Im just a novice Google earth user!