Education Platforms
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Second Life is a virtual world where educators can meet, chat, offer courses and lectures, etc.
Here is a Quick Start Guide (thanks to Leecy):
Second Life - QuickStart
1. Go to www.SecondLife.com. Create an account and name your avatar.
You pick your own first name, but need to use one of their provided lastnames
Note: Right away under the "View" menu select Camera controls and Movement controls, this will help you navigate more easily! If it is dark selecting "World" Force Sun Noon will give you 4 hours of daylight
2. Here are some spots you can go to get started and see what educators are doing:
Inside SL Click on the Map link at the bottom of your window: type in the numeric coordinates in the location fields, and click teleport.
- NCI/New Citizens Plaza -- Kuula 53, 169, 28
- Ivory Tower Library of Primitive, Natoma (208, 165, 27)
- Managing in the Innovation Age, Ohio University (70, 200, 26)
For more sites search Education or whatever you like.
Edunation is a thriving community of educators (mainly in Europe) who have developed a complex educational island at SL. Look for them at the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, May 18-20.
Tapped In is a free online campus where educators may claim their own virtual office. Go to the AALP group office by typing /enter AALP (be sure chat is enabled when you sign in to TI). A good place to meet students for "office hours" through live text chat. TI runs many events and is the location of regular meetings for interest groups of K-12 and adult professionals. (You must be signed in and click >Enable Chat to use the text chat. Pull down the >Actions menu and click >Detach to expand the chat field.) For help and directions on using tapped in, see [1]. You can set up your Webcam in Yahoo! Messenger so that your group can see each other as you text chat.
Moodle is a free, opensource course management system that can be downloaded to your server or used at the Moodle.com site for a fee. It has all of the features of most CMS applications. Moodle can offer a blog and a wiki, but these may not be as full-featured as you would like. (See [moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31 Moodle for Language Teaching] for help for educators.) As our list pointed out, "free" is a relative term: you can set up Moodle on your own server and provide your own tech help, or pay for these services at the Moodle server site. (It's still a bargain!)
Yahoo! Groups is free and allows the teacher to set up an email list service, a place to store photos, files, and links, and offers a database and a polling feature. While ads may feel a little overwhelming and intrusive at times, it has the advantage of keeping all discussion in one big list, which is threaded by search at the site (users have to be careful to use a good subject heading). The chat function is primitive, but does work. (Use Yahoo! Messenger instead--it has voice and Web cam.) The [dafnegonzalez.com/evo-07/index1.htm Electronic Village Online] has used Yahoo! Groups successfully for the past 5 years.
Learning Times provides a space for Net meetings with voice and text chat. The group leader may take participants on a Web tour, show a Powerpoint slide show, take a poll, and use an interactive whiteboard. Recordings save the sessions and run them as if the viewer were there.lt.jpg Free registration for educators and many communities with specialized interests to join. For more information and guidelines on how to use the Virtual Room (by Elluminate) at LearningTimes.org, please go to Elluminate Support
