week 4-Blog Post #7- Second Life

Liz Dalton

Full Sail University

I have a love/hate relationship with second life. I don't have fiber optics where I live and I have done everything possible to upgrade my Internet speed to the maximum but it is still slow. That coupled with my inexperience has made second life a frustrating experience. The first month in second life, I froze all the time. My team mates were probably really frustrated with me because I would always get lost. I just about threw my computer out the window a few times but the only thing that stopped me was my fascination with flying and trying to figure out what second life was all about. After watching the cool slide show Mind Map on Education 2.0, I realized there were many places I didn't realize were there. I just thought second life was to see, virtually, geographical places. I have learned after researching the second life assignments that there are many different educational opportunities. I am looking forward to visiting them. I have saved the slide show on my desktop and I would like to pick one place to discover for 1 hour per week. I would like to use second life as one of my options on my action research project. My problem is students not making up missed work when they are absent. My solution is to create a web site which will give the make up assignments. I would like to give students several multiple intelligence choices to make up their work. For example, I discovered a billboard in the cognitive process dimension in second life that gives information on hand washing. The assignment could be to have students go in to second life, find the bill board, take picture/s of important information and upload it on the web site or show to me.

I am so excited about Second Life Discovery Education Network. There is a seminar on September 30 on how to help students use digital resources. I am hoping this will help me set up my web site having students use the digital resources. The next seminar is on October 7 on having student using blogs. I want my Child Care students to reflect, via blog, on our pre-school activities once we start our pre-school (November 10). I want them to tell me how they thought the children likes the activities and what could we do different? I am hoping the blog seminar will help me with this. And the next seminar is on October 21 on help with second life. I hope that will increase my second life skills. I am so impressed with this site that I saved it on my net vibes page. There is so much to explore online I am really believing what I have been learning; give the students a computer and they will learn. Someone could spend day and night on the Internet and would not even come close to learning all you can on the Internet. Cyberspace is truly amazing.

References

http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/secondlife/

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%204/208/175/25

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jokay/sets/72157612171568581/show