Technology Center: 3D

Showing posts with label 3D. Show all posts

3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.

The free trial creature creator that we will be looking at allows you to create creatures, take snap shots of them and make videos of them to see how they move. Here's an example of a video I created to get students interested. I added the captions and text using i-Movie though you could just as easily use a free online video editor such as Video Toolbox or Windows Moviemaker if you are using a PC.

The creatures are very easy to create, you just drag and drop different features onto a body and the add colour and test them out to see how they move. These are some of the other creatures I created.

Once you have created your creatures you can either make videos of them, take snapshots, which you can either save or email to someone, or create an animated gif of your creature (I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the animated gifs)

Here' a tutorial showing you how it's done.

You can download a .mov version of the tutorial here or this pdf document has the main screen shots and instructions if you'd prefer to follow on paper.

You can download the Creature Creator from the Cnet website here. It's a big download (205MB), but once you have it, you don't need to have web access to do any of the tasks or create the movies and snapshots.

How do we use this with students?

Create images of different creatures and get the students to create a story about them.
Get the students to create descriptions of different creatures - This could include appearance, but also likes and dislikes, habits etc.
Get students to match pictures to descriptions.
Get students to create a creature based around your description.
Create a creature and use a picture of it as a picture dictation with one student describing the picture while the other one recreates the creature using the software.
Get students to create a short video of their creature and add a description and narrative below it as a video project.
Ask students to create a creature suitable for a particular environment, or types of tasks, then get students to discuss which they think would be best adapted for the environment.
Get the students to write instructions for how to create a creature.
Use the creatures to demonstrate present continuous tenses ( sitting, running etc.)

What I like about it.

It looks great on a data projector and if you work in a single computer classroom, you can get students up and dragging things around and creating in front of the class.
The creatures are very colourful and in the environment mode they really start to take on character.
You can use the tool to create versatile and stimulating materials.
It's free and pretty easy to use once you get it installed.
I like the integration with YouTube as it makes it very easy to get your videos online quite quickly.
I like that they can produce a range of gestures and expressions.

What I'm not so sure about.

It's a big download and will need to be installed on any computer it is used on, so if you want to use it in your school computer room, you'll need the help of a supportive IT manager to get it downloaded and installed on all the computers.
The Gifs it creates aren't that good, but you don't really need to use them.
You need a fairly good computer with a good graphics card for it to work well.

I hope you enjoy trying some of these ideas with your students.

Related links:

Best

Nik Peachey

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.

Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.

So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.

Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.

Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey

Immersive Image Environments

If you enjoy working with images with your EFL students, especially on an IWB (interactive whiteboard) or a data projector, then PicLens is exactly what you need.

PicLens is a plugin (small program) that works within your web browser (there are versions for Firefox, Safari and IE 7) and it converts many of the standard image sharing websites, like flickr, Photobucket, Google Images, Yahoo Images etc. into "3D immersive environments"!

To understand what that mean have a look at this short flash video tutorial which shows how to use PicLens.

Click here or on the image to view the movie (5Mb Flash)
OR
Download a version of this movie for i-pod / i-tunes here

At the click of the mouse the normal 2D web pages are converted into a wall of images which you can explore and enlarge.

How to use this with ELT students on your data projector or IWB

Pull up a wall of images and describe one while your students try to guess which one it is. Then get a student to describe an image and the others guess which one. (This will work best with quite similar images). You can then get students to do this in pairs.
Type in a search term and ask students to describe the connection / relevance of the image to the term (This works best when you enter abstract nouns like politics, alienation, paranoia etc.)
Use the resource for any new vocabulary words that come up in your lesson. Simply collect the words, type them in and find images that relate to the word. (This won't work for every word)
Get students to compare and contrast two images (A common task in EFL exams such as FCE)
Play just a minute and select an image for each student, they then have to talk for one minute about that image with repeating them selves or pausing (This is difficult to do, so don't expect too much) award points for the student who manages to speak for the longest.
Put students with their back to the images, select one and the other students (in two teams or groups) have to describe the image to the student who can't see it. The student then has to guess which image they described.
Pull up a single image and ask students to think about the photographer's intention.

Why did the photographer take the image?
What did they want to say?
What is their relationship to the image content?
What were they doing before, after they took the image?
Etc etc.

Students can select their favourite image and explain why they like it, or the one they like least.
Students can try to use their imagination to describe the space around the image that you don't see.

What's happening around the photographer that you don't see?
What is the photographer wearing?
What's happening behind the photographer?
Describe the photographer (age, gender, nationality, personality etc.)

What I like about it

The Plugin is free and very simple to download and install and less than 2 Mb
The interface is really easy to use and very attractive
It really highlights the images and frees then from the textual distraction that you often find on a web page
There's no advertising on it
You get access to some really fantastic images in class without having to download them or violate anyone's copyright
The most recent version also enables you to create immersive walls of videos from YouTube !!! Fantastic!

What I'm not so sure about

As with any image sharing / search bank you have to be careful with younger students that inappropriate images don't appear. You can get around this though by setting up your own account on something like Flickr and only using specific images from your account. This could be time consuming, but if you got other teachers and students to help, it could be a fantastic resource.
If you are on a slow connection it could take a bit longer for the images to load.

If you want to use PicLens then you can download it from here:

This is a really great tool for the connected ELT classroom and also great to use at home. I hope you are able to enjoy using it with your students. Do drop me a lne with any other ideas and activities you use with it.

Best

Nik

Second Life Teacher Training Videos

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.

The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.

Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2.

Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want.

This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback.

I've always avoided using audio on my own blog ones as I'm a bit self-conscious about my voice and I've felt that using text makes them easier to understand and keeps the file sizes a bit smaller. Any feedback on this would be very welcome as I'm considering changing over and using voice more.

Anyway. I hope you like the videos and find them useful. There's also a wealth of other useful materials on Russell's site, (as I said in my review of it last year) so be sure to check out the rest of it when you get a minute.

Best

Nik

PS: The image above is of my avatar in my Second Life office. Feel free to visit and look around. It's on Edunation Island at: http://tinyurl.com/ytz5go

3B Village 3D browser

I spotted 3B Village about a year ago and initially I was impressed, but some recent developments have, I feel, put this on the map as a really useful educational tool.

What is 3B Village?
3B Village is an amazing cross between a 3D virtual chat room and a web browser. Using the free software you can visit or create your own 3D rooms which have walls lined with webpages that you can click on to visit. You use an avatar to wander the rooms visiting various websites whilst text chatting with other virtual visitors.

Watch a demo here: Exploring 3B Village (2.4Mb Flash)

The learning potential for this software is huge and I can see how it could be especially useful for creating webquests or web based treasure hunts and other collaborative tasks for groups of students working virtually / at a distance. The software has none of the versatility of virtual worlds like Second Life, but partially due to that it seems like a much ‘safer’ environment to take students into and a much simpler one for teachers and students to learn how to navigate.

It is very easy to create your own rooms for your class and then just invite them along. You can create a room by specifying the URL of particular resources you want to share with your students or you can generate a ‘quick room’ using a range of other sources, like Flickr , Google, MySpace and you can even generate rooms full of YouTube videos.

I created a room just by doing a search in YouTube based on ‘Shakira’ I then create a quick room by pasting in the URL of my search results and within less than 5 clicks and 5 mins I had room full of videos to wander around.

See how it looks: Shakira video room (2.5Mb Flash)

I also created a gallery type room by typing the word ‘family’ into Flickr and generating a gallery based on the results.

See how it looks: Flickr gallery room (2.0Mb Flash)

Here’s a quick tutorial movie to show you just how easy it is to create a room

Creating a quick room using Google search (1.5Mb Flash)

How to use this with students

Create webquests and store the resources in a special 3B room(s) so that groups of students can work together virtually analysing data and searching for and sharing information
Create film shows from Youtube that students can watch together. They can then do their viewing tasks together and discuss them as they watch.
Meet together virtually and discus / share web resources
Create your own collection of bookmarks to share with your class
Students who have a 'MySpace' can convert it to a 3B room and show their classmates around. This should help to build up a sense of presence and familiarity with virtual classes, something that is often hard to do.
Get your students to create their own collection of study bookmarks as a project to share with other students
Create rooms based on materials from Flickr and get students to meet virtually to discuss the images
Students can work together to create a 3B room or village which represents their town or country
Students can visit a 3B city and write a report on it, plan a visit to that place based on the resources they access there.

What I like about it

A nice collection of rooms already created including some for kids
You can either create rooms quickly using searches through various online content such as Flickr, YouTube, or Google, or you can hand pick websites to create a customised room specifically for your students
It’s simple to use
It’s free
At 14Mb it’s not too huge a download
Love wandering round the YouTube video type rooms and this may well be a way around institution that block YouTube!!?

What I'm not so sure about

No MAC version yet
Would be great if it had voice chat too
It’s definitely for broadband users only
A lot of the ready made rooms seem to be aimed at online shoppers
There aren’t many casual visitors, so it’s not a place where students are likely to bump into people for casual conversation. Though that could well be an advantage too.

For anyone involved in distance education or any kind of online courses, I think 3B Village could make a really valuable contribution.

To use 3B Village you’ll need to download and install the 3B browser software from.
http://download.3b.net/
There’s no MAC version yet, but they are working on it.

As ever, I would love to hear from anyone who uses this with their students. Please feel free to leave comments, though they will be moderated.

Best

Nik

Machinima with Moviestorm

I recently came across a very impressive piece of software for making Machinima. It’s still in Beta at the moment, and it’s free, so I’ve spent a bit of time looking at it and seeing how it works.

For those of you who don’t know, machinima is a form of animated cinema, which is produced in computer games or virtual worlds. In some case the animated characters are ‘played’ by avatars and in others the characters are figures within a virtual world which are controlled by a ‘producer’.

Moviestorm offers the second of these two options, so once you have downloaded it from the Moviestorm site, you no longer need an internet connection and you can work alone or with a group to produce your machinima project.

The software is pretty impressive and can enable you to do many things. You can;

create stage sets and characters,
place the characters on the set
get them to move and interact with each other and various props
place cameras around the set to film the action from different places
create and record a script for your characters
lip-sync the animated characters with the recorded dialogue
cut, edit and render your final movie in a format which can easily be distributed on the web or CD.

So this is pretty much all you need to get started creating machinima movies.

Here’s a demo movie to show how to create the action
Here’s a demo movie to show how to film the action

So why do this with students?
The learning potential of the software is huge, even if you don’t ever get your students to a stage where they can produce their own movies.

You can get them to create characters and change them to practice language of description
You can use it to practice a whole range of clothing, colours and textures
You can get them to create a set and place things to practice prepositions of place
You can create your own movies to demonstrate a whole range of prepositions of movement, various tenses
You can add dialogue to the movies to demonstrate functional and intercommunicative language

Personally I feel though that the software is ideal for project work. You can get your students working together in groups on their own machinima projects. They can right a screen play and a script it. Record themselves and lip-sync to the animated characters, decide on and create their own scenes and stage sets. Even the act of learning ho to use the software would make for an excellent project. There is an online forum where users of the software can exchange ideas and help each other.

You would probably need to run the project over the space of a few weeks or even months and be sure to specify to students before they begin how you intend to evaluate their work on the project. I’m sure that most students would find this a motivating and creative way to practice language.

What I liked about it

It’s free, not too difficult to learn and doesn’t involve any programming skill.
Once you’ve downloaded it you don’t need an internet connection to use it
The tool set is great and you can make the animated characters do a whole range of things and film them from loads of different angles
It’s fun to use and learn and easy enough so that you can install the software and produce a short clip within an hour
Any films you produce with the software are your own property and you have the right to sell and distribute them!!

What I wasn’t so sure about

It’s a big download (almost 200Mb) so you’ll either need a good connection or a lot of patience to download it.
There are expansion packs with more stage sets, props and characters but you have to pay for these (not that you really need them)
There’s no MAC version and you need a pretty good graphics card and a lot of RAM for it to run easily

On the whole I think this is really one to watch. As more people start using it and the forum / user community builds up I think this will turn into an excellent resource.

If you want to find out more about Machinima have a look at a few of these links.

Machinima.com
The home of machinima and probably one of the biggest collection of machinima films and links.

Machinima and education
An interesting article from Futurelab on the uses and benefits of including machinima in education

SecondLifeVideo.com
A site designed to help machinima creators within the virtual world of Second life to upload and share their creations.
Here’s a widegt from their site that shows some of the arts machinima being created in SL

Wikipedia
More information and a definition from Wikipedia

I hope you enjoy the software and I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets their students working with it.

Looking at There.com

For a while now I’ve been a fan of the virtual 3D world There.com. Although it isn’t as developed and hasn’t had a fraction of the publicity of Second Life I think there are a few things in its favour and for anyone wanting to take some steps into teaching in virtual worlds or for students who are interested in finding others to chat to or practice their language skills with, they could do far worse.

What is there.com?
It’s a simple 3D online virtual world where multiple players can create avatars, create worlds, build and interact with each other. The interaction is mainly through movement gesture and text chat, but voice chat is also possible too if you opt to pay for a premium membership rather than free. Have a look here if you want to see the maker's description.

If you want to see what it looks like, there is a video here created by the company, but it's quiet a big download (30Mb)

What I like about it.

There are a number of attractive features within There.com. The most striking one for me is the way the text chat appears in cartoon-like balloon bubbles, which order themselves as the conversation progresses. This makes the conversation very easy to follow.
I also like that when you register you get a free hover board (a bit like a small flying surfboard) and there are areas of the world where you can go to do speed trials or join other hover-boarding enthusiasts for races or lessons. See how to ride a hoverboard movie (3.5Mb)
The visual graphics of the world are far less detailed than in Second Life, for example, but this means that the hardware and bandwidth requirements are much less, so you don’t need an expensive computer with high-end graphics card to join in the fun. The system requirements also claim that you can enjoy the world even if you are on a 56k dial up connection, though this I find much harder to believe.
During my visits to There.com, I’ve generally found the other inhabitants to be much friendlier than in SL and generally more willing to talk to strangers (though I have a female avatar in There.com, so that could be part of the difference).
There are regular organised events taking place so you can go along and be sure that someone will be there and something will be happening. You can see what’s going on in the ‘There Fun Times’ new site: http://www.therefuntimes.com/
There.com offers a range of developer tools including a style maker for those interested in designing clothes etc.
There are some ready made ‘Quests’ so there are things for students to do which will get them working together and exploring the world.
The world is much more controlled than SL so there isn’t the ‘adult’ type of sexual imagery and content. Though that isn’t to say that it is safer in terms of the people who may be visiting, so the normal precautions apply. There is a guide for parents though and Online safety tips
The picture taking tool is handy for getting students to produce follow-up assignments. Here’s a picture of me (my avatar) exploring an Egyptian tomb close to the Pyramids.
There.com has some very active machinima projects and also has a yearly machinima film festival

What isn’t so good

Generally it has a much smaller population so there tend to be less people about than in more popular worlds. So if you are recommending it as a place for your students to just hang out and meet other native speakers, then they might be disappointed.
There is a voice client that enables audio voice chat, but to use it you have to have a premium membership and that involves paying. Though it is just a one-off single payment of $9.95 (about £5) and this also allows you to start building and selling things for ‘there bucks’.
If you make things within There.com you have to pay to store them in-world.
There.com isn't Mac friendly and you can't log into the site through Firefox either

How can I use it with my students?

You could get them to do some Quest activities together.
You could ask them to visit various places and take photographs (Using the camera tools), then produce an illustrated report or narrate a story.
You could ask them to find out how to ride a hover-board and how to drive a ‘there’ buggy and then teach each other.
If you have distance students, you could host your class in a There.com beach hut.
Start a machinima project. Get your students to write a script for their avatars, storyboard the action and act it out in world. Then film the scenes and edit it together as a movie. Here's a guide on how to create machinima in There.com
Organise a hover-boarding tournament for your students
Take a series of pictures and get the students to create a story around them

Really though I think for these environments to work well for language learning you need to use them with distance learners or within a blended learning context. Not one where students are meeting regularly face to face.

Conclusion
On the whole I think There.com is a fun and very sociable environment where teens are likely to enjoy hanging out and meeting people. There are things to do there and it has the potential to be quite accessible because the makers’ claim that it can run on much lower spec computers without broadband. It doesn’t have the visual impact and programming potential that more complex worlds like Second Life have, but if you just want to make a start on understanding how these worlds work and what the potential is, before you invest serious money in a powerful computer, then There.com is well worth a look.

I'd be really interested to hear what other people think of There.com, especially with ideas to use with students.

best

Nik

Teaching English in Second Life

Over the past few weeks I've been pretty busy teaching my first English students on a Business English course I have been developing for Second Life.

The experience has been pretty daunting with myself and the students having to come to terms with the complexities of the user interface and I have felt at times that my fifteen years of 'real world' classroom experience and the subconscious habits and reflexes that I developed over that period have totally deserted me.

The introduction of voice within SL has certainly made a huge difference, though there are still problems and bugs to be ironed out. Though to my surprise I did find myself drilling a group of advanced learners to help them with their word stress, something I rarely do in the 'real' language classroom. To my relief though, the number of students in the class seems to be steadily increasing rather than decreasing and they seem keen to come back for more.

As part of the course I've found it necessary to give a lot of help with the user interface, especially with some of the complexities of manipulating the voice client to get students into pairs and groups without having to shift them across the island so they don't overhear each other.

I've created these videos which have been really useful both for myself and my students, so I thought I'd share them here. I hope that anyone involved in teaching in SL finds them useful, and anyone who isn't involved gets some insight into how this tool can be used, particularly for language learning.

This one shows how you can get students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people you are working with. (Be careful though. This feature still seems to be a bit buggy)
View the movie
This one shows how can use the 'Active Speaker' panel so that you can change the volume of the other speakers around you or mute them.
View the movie
This one shows you how to create a note card to take notes during the lesson.
View the movie
This one shows how to copy notes from Second Life note cards into a Word document (If you want to keep copies of your notes outside of SL)
View the movie
This one shows you how to share and pass note cards to other avatars / students.
View the movie
This first one shows you how to set up the interface so that you can listen to audio and watch video.
View the movie
This one shows you how to use the camera tools to take pictures / snapshots within Second Life.
View the movie

Hope you enjoy and benefit from these. Please feel free to leave comments.

Best Nik Peachey

Voice in Second Life

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying out the new voice client for Second Life and despite a few remaining bugs with voice groupings it seems to work pretty well. It is sensitive to distance and location! If you turn around while someone is speaking to you, it really does sound like they are behind you etc.

It is possible to put groups / pairs of students (avatars) into different groups so that they can only hear the 'person' within their pair or group and for the 'teacher' to switch between groups to listen in on how each group is doing. (though this is still buggy at present)

This is really going to open up the potential for language teaching.

How to try it out

If you want to try the voice client out. You will need to download a separate 'First look Viewer'. You can get this from: http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php
It seems to run fine on both MAC and PC.
If you can't get it to work, it could be that either your firewall or anti-virus is blocking it, so you may need to check your settings.
You'll also need a reasonably good quality microphone and headset, preferably with USB connection.
NOTE: Not all areas within SL are voice enabled
To find voice enabled areas check out this map

I hope you enjoy this and by all means leave a comment to say how you got on.

Materials design for Virtual Worlds

I was recently lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation on course and materials design for Second Life at the SLanguages 2007 virtual conference (June 23rd 2007) which took place on the Edunation Island in Second life. The conference itself was a fascinating event and the experience of presenting a conference paper within a virtual world to an audience of avatars was certainly a new and novel one for me.

I was asked to give this presentation because I have been working over the last few months on designing a Business English course for Second Life. As part of putting together the presentation I came up with a list of lessons I’ve learnt while going through the process of designing the course. The list is by no means finalised and I’m sure it will continue to grow and change as I learn more about developing materials for this world, but I thought I’d publish it here for anyone who is interested in designing their own materials for language teaching in SL.

For anyone who hasn’t already visited Second Life then you can download some instructions from here and see how it is done (1.3Mb pdf). Be warned though. To access SL you need to have a good broadband connection and quite a powerful computer. See system requirements

So here is my list of things to think about if you are trying to design teaching materials for Second Life. Feel free to leave comments.

Tips for language learning materials design in Second Life

1. Design outside the classroom box and into the computer game box
Think about the kinds of common computer game genre. They are really quite limited. The main ones are things like

Driving or flying games (Grand Prix racing etc)
Shooter games (Kill everything in sight etc.)
Sports type games ( Football, Golf etc.)
Strategy type games ( Zoo Tycoon, Hotel Tycoon etc.)
Sims type games (The Sims, Sims 2 Pets etc.)

Think about how these can be made collaborative and why students playing them might need to communicate. Admittedly, it’s much easier to produce these types of games if you have an island and a team of technicians to work on them for you. If you haven’t there are still plenty of things you can do using places and objects already built in world. If you get your students to go to Nissan Altima Island they can pick up there own car, which they can either use there or anywhere else to have a driving competition. On AOL Pointe they can get their own skateboard and a collection of tricks to do on it. There are numerous places to play just about any sport you can think of. Finding and learning how to use these objects and places could be a communicative task in itself.

2. Build in ownership of the environment
If you have your own Island why not build a student area of some kind. Somewhere they can post their own materials, pictures etc. or give them their own room to decorate.

3. Give students control of their learning / activities
When you design learning tasks like role-plays let students be themselves, don’t try too hard to orchestrate things like what they will do, where they will be or what they will say. Good role-play is like jazz improvisation, you provide a structure and students improvise within it.

4. Make learning and task goals clear to students
Sounds obvious, but when we know why they are doing things we often take it foregranted that students know. This often isn’t the case, so be sure to let your students know why you want them to do something and what you think they should be achieving.

5. Make sure that students get individualised feedback on their performance
Especially in virtual world activities where students are in reality quite isolated and really sitting at home on a computer alone, it’s very important that they get some feedback on their performance and know how they are doing. Keeping note cards at the ready while you are monitoring your students can be really handy for making notes to pass to them at the end of the lesson.

6. Maximise student to student interaction
Now that Second life is going to have voice communication for everyone, there is no excuse for the activities to be tutor led. Let the students work together. Be sure to explore the voice capabilities and look at how you can group and pair students for voice chat.

7. Breakdown texts into smaller chunks and make ‘input’ tasks collaborative.
SL isn’t a text driven environment and doesn’t really lend itself to reading long texts. It’s much better to divide your texts up by giving a small chunk to each student on a note card, and then get them to reconstruct the overall meaning collaboratively.

8. Make the activities engaging on a mental (cognitive), personal and a cultural level
SL offers us the opportunity to connect people from all around the world, so be sure that your tasks and activities draw on that international experience and exploit the unique experiences that each student brings from their culture.

9. Build the materials into the immediate SL environment
SL is a wonderfully rich graphic environment. Try to make sure your materials exploit that immediate environment. Get students doing things in different places and moving around. Don’t just try to recreate a classroom in SL, remember the most successful language learning that happens goes on outside the classroom.

10. Make tasks relevant to real life and real SL life
The borders between real life and SL are becoming increasingly blurred. Think about how virtual 3D worlds will become integrated into our everyday lives and the kinds of skills people will need to operate and communicate in them effectively.

11. Exploit the ‘authentic’ SL world
There are lots of interesting and novel things to do and places to go in SL, so why not exploit them and design activities around them? Get students to go out in groups and explore and create reports, plan trips and tours for each other, bring back experiences to share with other class members.

12. Exploit the SL user interface
The SL user interface is an incredibly useful tool and has lots of features that can be used creatively. The snapshot tool can help students to create magazine reports with wonderful graphics or a photo diary of their experiences. The movie tool can help students to create machinima. They can use it to create their own video interviews, advertisements, or record role plays or drama productions.

13. Train learners to exploit the SL user interface / develop good IT literacy / study skills.
The user interface can also be used more or less effectively as a study tool, to take notes make records or to share information. Make sure that you train students to use it effectively, so that it aids rather than obstructs their study.

14. Build in social interaction
Knowledge is socially constructed and language is a social function. Try to design social time and space into your course and your tasks.

15. Create and exploit information gaps
Make sure that you create the need to communicate within your tasks. Creating information gap type activities is relatively easy in SL as you have a lot of control about how and who you give information to.

16. Develop and exploit the students’ relationship to their avatar
The SL avatar that represents your student can become a vehicle for the expression of their personality. Think about how you can involve this relationship between student and avatar in your activities.

The Slanguage 2007 conference was sponsored by The consultants-e
Video and audio transcripts of the presentations can be found on the Edunation Island at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation/178/40/22/

If you are a teacher and you are interested in developing language teaching materials for Second Life or doing some language teaching there get in touch with The consultants-e as they are now running seminars and training sessions in SL.

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