NZSL Tour of Second Life

BubbleShare: Share photos - Play some Online Games.


On Wednesday evening I took a group of New Zealand teachers for a short tour education tour of Second Life. This was a continuation of the breakout workshop I did in Rotorua with Jane Nicholls, in which we formed a second life group named NZSL, New Zealand teachers in Second Life.

We started out at the Discovery Educator Centre on Eduisland 2. Here we looked at creating landmarks, teleporting and using voice and text chat.

We then moved on to the Teacher Network Centre to look at the free educator resources they have on offer there, lots of landmarks, tips and tools to help teachers and students build resources in second life.

From there we teleported to the San Fransesco Assisi recreation. A truly amazing place, lovingly recreated in second life...it gives a very different perspective than looking at a flat photo on a page or website!

A stop at the SL Planetarium gave them an opportunity to look at the solar system... fantastic for science learning.

Our last stop was into the world of literature...Wizard's Alley, better known as Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter Books. Visit the Leaky Cauldron, walk into the marketplace to buy a broom or a wand... or go and look through Hogwarts, and stop to talk with the "students" there.

This took over an hour to visit just these four places and we are keen to do another tour soon. If you would like to take part, you will need to have a second life account, and log into second life and join the NZSL group, we'd love to have you on board.

What I learned at Learning@School

Well, the learning@school conference has come and gone like a herd of stampeding gazelle. I'm still not sure if I was a cheetah waiting for an opportunity to pounce or a meerkat trying not to get run over...

It is a busy, busy time, and this year it was busier than usual having to deliver two workshops as well. These both went well (although it IS very hard to deliver an interactive workshop on second life when you have no internet...) and I made some great new connections with teachers from all over the country. For me this is one of the main strengths of a conference like this, the opportunity to meet other teachers and build those connections across classrooms and schools.

Several thought provoking keynote speeches made me think in a variety of ways, and I'll post more on them when I manage to get my thoughts in order.

I managed to get to three great breakouts this year. The first was on Numbers, the new spreadsheet application in iWork 08. Why some of the superb features have not been included in excel years before baffles me. It was great to work in a spreadsheet and have so many handy and intuitive tools at hand.

Next I went to a workshop with Robyn Garden from Southland Girls High. Robyn was part of the digiops Project ACTIVate. This looked at action research with interactive whiteboards. Her presentation was on the action research process and I picked up some great tips and resources to share.

Lastly I looked at MARVIN, the new software application that has been picked up by the software licensing agreement. Wow, an amazing package, and I'm going to have to put back my bootcamp partition just so I can play with it some more, as unfortunately it is a PC package. MARVIN allows you create real time animation with a variety of 3D avatars with speech and text as well.

I am now keen to share all that I have seen with my cluster schools, and run some staff meetings and workshops!

Off to Learning@School 08

Well, it's time to pack the bags, and head off to Rotorua for Learning@School 08 tomorrow.

I always look forward to this conference (even though I do miss my beautiful family while I am gone!), as it is a chance to catch up face to face with those I usually only 'see' digitally, and also to make new connections. I look forward to the blogger's cafe and other experiences...

This year I am presenting two workshops, one on cluster websites, and building virtual communities. This is a workshop that I have promised a few people to do, and I'm a bit nervous about it as I really do not consider myself an expert at these things. I constantly struggle to promote and improve our own cluster site. I do hope it will be a great think tank session though, and a chance for people to get together and share resources and tips for creating a successful cluster site.

The other workshop is on second life in education. I'm doing it with fellow facilitator Jane Nicholls. It is a quite ambitious project as we hope to have at least 20 people online and in-world exploring the educational possibilities of virtual worlds. A good test of the Novotel's broadband bandwidth! If all goes well, it promises to be a fantastic session and attendees will come away with a huge bag of digital...err...virtual resources.

Bring on the learning!

Kath Murdoch Seminar

Here I am, at the Art Gallery rearranging the furniture because the chairs were all in rows and Kath does not like lecturing to a room full of rows... "It's just not inquiry like" she says... yay...I hate rows too.

We start the day talking about the importance of goal setting and understanding the way we learn. Things such as learning styles and multiple intelligences come in to conversation.

After some lively discussion during an true/false activity, Kath helps us all construct a wonder wall about inquiry learning. Our questions are:

• How can we make inquiry work with different ages levels? How do we account for the experience and developmental stage of our learners?
• How do you manage the balance between teacher and student directed learning?
• The role of content and process in the inquiry process.

So...what makes it 'inquiry'? Word Splash: understanding-driven, collaboration, metacognition and reflection, prior learning, active investigation, self-regulating, sustained and connected, authenticity, differentiation.

Some underlying principles

1. Inquiry learning involves working with students prior understanding and experience to challenge, reconstruct and deepen understanding. New concepts and information are best understood when we help students reveal their preconceptions about a topic. New learning must be connected to prior experiences and 'ways of seeing'.
2. Inquiry learning involves students in exploring questions of significance. Investigation of questions - some teacher determined , some student determined and others co-constructed...is the essence of inquiry to investigate these questions in an active and sustained way.

'Where are we up to?' chart. Use this tool to allow self regulation in students during the inquiry topic. Also allows teacher to see when students are ready for conferencing.

What makes a good integrated inquiry focus?

• Will it be engaging?
• Is it suitably generative?
• Is it worth learning about?
• Is there potential for active investigation?
• Is there potential for action?
• Does this topic provide a context for meeting curriculum expectations?

"We want to give out students time to explore what intrigues them, and we want to make sure they visit the important sites they might miss without guidance. Teachers need to map out the landscape and highlight some of the most important places to stop." Tina Blythe, 1988

What makes a quality understanding goal?

• It is elastic/fluid. Allows for a variety of view points and directions within it.
• Contains transferable concepts.
• Are demonstrable by students.
• Avoid value judgments.
• Are not facts or low level knowledge.
  

Tuning in is not just immersion in topic, it is reconnaissance and assessment. What prior knowledge and experiences are your students (and yourself) bringing to this investigation? The major purpose of this phase is assessment.

• What do I already know and think about this?
• How do I think this works? What's my theory?
• Do I have any questions about this?
• Why is this worth learning about?
• Where are we headed?
  

The sorting out phase is what you do to make meaning from the data you have gathered during the finding out phase. The Arts are a powerful method of sorting out ideas and concepts.

Text to activity
Text to self: In what ways does this text relate to your own self?
Text to text: In what ways does this text relate to another text? eg: book, film, song.
Text to world: In what ways does this text relate to the things in the world?

Going Further
Revisiting your initial questions, coming up with new questions. Chances for personalizing learning and new tangents.
Use of contracts and scaffolds to structure students learning.
Wonder boxes: Individual boxes which contain students questions. Students take them out during investigation to share,sort, and perhaps rewrite or answer them.


Today was a great opportunity to listen to, talk with and share ideas with Kath, and I look forward to bringing her to our cluster in September!