The ever expanding horizons of virtual reality

Our group project is coming together. During my exploration of Second Life, I wandered into WIRED Island. The collaborative effort of three Ohio universities, this area was rich in examples of using virtual reality in a wide range of applications. The YouTube video above is featured on the site.
If you like it, I'd invite you to visit WIRED Island in second life. It is one of the better areas I have visited.

NOTE: This video does not have sound. I don't know why, but it is silent.

Doing the Tourist Thing in Second Life

We've been exploring the many uses of Second Life. I took a few screen shots while exploring today and uploaded them to my Flickr account. If you'd like to see them, go to my Flickr pages at:  Pat's Flickr pics and see what you think.  SL is especially being used by universities and departments of education across the land.  I found one place for assistive technology use in school that even had a brief orientation explaining the requirement of school administrators to have tech staff involved in providing differentiated learning experiences to students. Wow.

I also saw some examples of colleges teaming up with high schools to offer experience building things and competing in technology projects. The results were then displayed in SL.

This sort of thing takes a lot of collaboration and TIME.  It is still more for post-secondary learners. Use of this in high schools is still an evolving thing. You'd really have to team up with someone already in the virtual setting. I don't think most small town schools could afford to dedicate staff to actually building and maintaining SL sites or experiences. They'd have to use what is already there.

The Adventure Continues

Hi, again, from Second Life. This place is a bit glitchy but it does have lots of possibilities. Today I've been fussing over getting my APA based assignment done correctly. Our team is working on a contract. I am hoping we can agree on it and turn it in ASAP. I am also looking for an e-mail that should tell us more about our team experience in Second Life for Thursday.

In doing reading for our APA assignment I came across two articles I especially liked. I will post links to them here. The first is by Australian James C. Taylor at the University of Southern Queensland. He suggests that practice is leading theory when it comes to using technology in the classroom. The second article is a research paper that challenges the idea that today's teens are smarter than previous generations and use technology intuitively because they've grown up surrounded by it. I am interested in these papers because I hear statements about kids being digital natives and some how smarter or superior to the rest of us and I question that. I'm not saying we don't need to teach differently, but some of the assumptions people have been making provoke me to see more proof that it is so.

Check these articles out and see what you think.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:-LvS_coPsbMJ:www.usq.edu.au/users/taylorj/publications_presentations/2

http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/kennedy.html

Converter for Flip camera files to use in iMovie

When the camcorder that is part of my education package didn't arrive in time for our first assignment using iMovie, I was forced to fall back on using my Flip camera. Unfortunately, when I tried to import my .avi files into iMovie, it didn't work. Enter FSO support. Those guys are really great. I was led to a download for streamclip, which easily allowed me to convert my .avi files to MP4.  Once I converted one .avi file, the other files I hadn't been able to access could also be imported.  I thought I'd put this in my blog 1) so that if I need it later I can refer back to this video to remember how it works, and 2) in case anyone else has a similar or wants to try the converter for other reasons.

Second Life

Hello from Second Life! Zoe and I spent some time today acclimating ourselves to the site. I actually got my account 2 years ago after attending one of many tech workshops, but after initially spending hours exploring the site and figuring a few things out, I lost interest.  I couldn't get the videos to play on some of the sites set up by various colleges and it was not much fun visiting medieval villages and gardens and such without a friend along to talk to. 

Zoe and I finally ended up at EdTech Island. This place is great, partly because it isn't crowded with new people. I can talk to Zoe there without strangers walking up and trying to start conversations. I am interested to see Dr. Wyly's house next week.

Earlier I had some ideas for using Second Life in my classroom, but one of the hindrances is the amount of time it takes to create things and the learning curve for figuring out how to create an environment. I wanted to make a place my history students could visit, but I can see it will take countless hours to learn how to create such a place.

Anyway, here is a picture of my Avatar in Second Life!  Maybe some of the others will know stuff and will be able to help me master some of the intricacies of this site.

Discovering new sources

The research I am doing for my Masters program at Full Sail is turning up some pretty good sites. I've used digital storytelling in my classes, so I chose to explore the digital storytelling resources for our current assignment. There were a lot of good links, but I especially liked http://electronicportfolios.org/digistory/index.html

This site has tons of examples of digital storytelling, including a lot created in an educational setting. I think it is well worth visiting.

Getting to know my Full Sail classmates

We've now had our third Wimba session and have been forming groups for our first class. The people in our class seem to be really nice. It's a diverse group, too. I am finding others with similar points-of-view and several with some really excellent experience that goes way beyond anything I've been able to do yet. I wish I could visit some of their schools and observe! I could just take a year off and immerse myself in all of this...but that wouldn't really be practical. Besides, I will want to apply some of the things I've been learning in my classroom this year and see how they work.

I'm really grateful there are such neat people in the class who are so friendly and willing to share their experience and knowledge. I am really isolated in my own school setting. Having this chance to network with my Full Sail classmates is really going to help me this year. I must confess, I've been getting a little burned out after 10 years in our Community Ed program.  I taught the Middle School Expulsion program for 3 semesters and have been doing Even Start/Alternative High School for 8 years. We are in a separate building and don't get a chance to collaborate with teachers at the high school. We hardly get a chance to talk among ourselves as staff. There is no common planning time, so we're lucky to have more than a few words together during any given day. Really, we have each been on our own. I think we could be really dynamic and effective if the program were structured to allow us to collaborate. As it is, we are each just doing the best that we can, isolated in our own classrooms, with a minimum of interaction.

I'm thinking the project I'm going to do for my masters might give me a chance to interact more with other teaching staff, including those at the high school.  We'll see! I certainly hope so. If not, I am encouraged by the friendliness of the people in my on-line class. I have really been needing a chance to network with others, especially those with an interest in integrating technology into the classroom.
 I'm looking forward to getting to know them better during the next year.