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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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'...

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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...

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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...

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