Download to read offline
Uploaded byBarbara McQueen
How to get there from here
This document discusses using virtual worlds to teach English. It notes that virtual worlds allow students and teachers to be anywhere and learn through experience. However, many teachers recreate traditional classrooms instead of taking advantage of the virtual world's possibilities. The document recommends using games and quests to motivate students by fulfilling their desires to make friends, communicate, personalize their avatar, and feel powerful. It provides examples of complex adventure tasks and assessments that have been created in virtual worlds for English learning. Finally, it discusses which virtual worlds may be best and considerations for the future of virtual world-based education.
More Related Content
Similar to How to get there from here
![[RESOURCES] Are you Ready to MUVE? An Introduction to Virtual Worlds](https://cdn.slidesharecdn.com/ss_thumbnails/thv2011-110809201606-phpapp01-thumbnail.jpg?width=640&height=640&fit=bounds)
How to get there from here
- 2. • 30+ years •5 countries • Then OMG!!!!
- 3. •Virtual worlds canallow students to live the English they are trying to learn. •Students and teachers can be from anywhere.
- 4. So I wentexploring . . . •Second Life •Open Sim grid •Kitely •Franco grid •Craft World •Great Canadian grid •3rd Rock grid •Active World •Sinespace
- 7.
- 8. In virtual worlds, youcan be anyone . . .
- 9. . . .go anywhere,
- 10. . . .and do anything.
- 11. Vs. traditional brick andmortar classrooms
- 12. Too many teacherscreated replicas of real world classrooms!!!!
- 13. A step inthe right direction, but only a step.
- 14.
- 15. My administration wouldn’t approve. EverythingI do must focus on curriculum standards/objectives.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23. 1. Give the studentswhat they want and need most. 2. Do it with games. 3. Do it with prizes and gifts.
- 24. WHAT STUDENTS WANTMOST 1. To find and make friends 2. To talk to these friends 3. To look cool by: a. Personalizing their avatars b. Moving more suavely and quickly 4. To become super-human
- 25.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
- 32.
- 33.
- 42. Other Essentials forCoolness
- 44.
- 45. Companies of thefuture will need employees who can: Collaborate on and Research Create Combine then Present Reflect Across Cultures Delegate/divide up complex tasks Evaluate Negotiate Persist that require them to It’s fun, but . . ..
- 46. WHY GAMES? A testvs. a quest: Stress vs. a challenge Dopamine arrives and delivers.
- 47.
- 48.
- 50.
- 58. GOING FROM FLATTO 3D
- 65.
- 77.
- 78.
- 80.
- 82.
- 87. Key knowledge slideshows WHATTEACHERS NEED TO BUILD
- 88.
- 89. Boards of UsefulPhrases
- 90.
- 91.
- 92.
- 93.
- 94.
- 95.
- 97.
- 98.
- 99. Aldrich, Clark. LearningOnline with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. Bretzmann, Jason. Flipping 2.0: Practical strategies for flipping your class. 1st ed., Pittsburgh, PA, Bretzmann Group LLC, 2013. “Educational Trends.” Educational trends, www.eun.org/observatory/trends. Accessed 16 June 2016. Francis, R. “Engaging literature students through role play and set creation in a virtual world.” 5th Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference. 5th Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference, 16 Mar. 2012. BIBLIOGRAPHY
- 100. Johnson, L, etal. NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. 2015, NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition, cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-k12- EN.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2016. Johnson, L, et al. NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition. 2016, NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition, cdn.nmc.org/media/2016-nmc- horizon-report-he-EN.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2016. Johnson, L, et al. The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. 2014, The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition, www.nmc.org/pdf/2014-nmc-horizon-report-he-EN.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2016. McQueen, Barbara, et al. “Learning by Doing in 3D Environments.” Advances in Game-Based Learning Handbook of Research on Collaborative Teaching Practice in Virtual Learning Environments, July 2017, pp. 317–347., doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2426-7.ch017.
- 101. McQueen, Barbara. “HowCan You Start Living in English?” Pulse, LinkedIn, 31 Oct. 2017, www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-can-you-start-living-english-barbara- mcqueen/. Meskill, Carla, and Natasha Anthony. Teaching Languages Online. Bristol, UK: MM Textbooks, 2010. Park, Stephen, and Kei Ibaraki. “Why Korean and Japanese students can't speak English.” YouTube, Asian Boss, 17 Feb. 2015, youtu.be/wW920zWkIQI. Accessed 13 June 2016. Watkins, Ryan. 75 e-Learning Activities: Making Online Learning Interactive. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2005.
Editor's Notes
- #3 My name is Barbara McQueen. For more than 30 years, I taught English as a second or foreign language in 5 countries. Then I had an incredible “Oh, my God!” experience, and now I have a “significant other.” Her name is Barbara Novelli.
- #4 She is my avatar in multiple virtual worlds because one day several years ago, I stumbled across Second Life and thought, “Oh, my God!” “This is an environment where students could really live the English they are trying to learn, and students and teachers could be from anywhere.” “This is a world where impossibilities can become possible.”
- #5 So I went exploring across many grids and in many avatar varieties checking out what existed, and especially what existed in the way of in-world language education.
- #6 I had a lot of fun . . .
- #7 . . . and met many people from many different countries.
- #8 But ultimately, I was disappointed, and that’s what led me to shifting the direction of the work I do, and that’s where the impetus for this presentation came from. Let’s rewind for a moment, and look at what I discovered.
- #9 Remember that virtual worlds are incredible. In virtual worlds, you can change your shape, your age, your race, your gender, and even your species.
- #10 You can also visit anywhere that exists in the present, and you can go into the past, the future, and fantasy worlds found in fiction.
- #11 And you can do what would be too dangerous or expensive to do in real life.
- #12 So where is the problem I saw? Here is a traditional “brick and mortar” classroom that so many teachers are used to. Some teachers and even whole universities decided to take a risk and come into virtual worlds, and they created . . .
- #13 . . . virtual replicas of real world classrooms, lecture halls, and universities!!!! No!!!!
- #14 A few teachers stepped outside of their classroom boxes and had their students meet each week in a home or a coffee shop or a library or on tree stumps around a campfire on a beach. But I don’t care where you’re sitting, if all you do is sit in the same place week after week, it’s not enough. You are not using this marvelous new medium as it should be used.
- #15 Why did these teachers limit themselves so much? I’ve heard many reasons. But none of them resonate with me because it’s easy to show you how to surmount them.
- #16 Today I will walk you through how to begin in small, easy steps that don’t cost much. And I will show you how what you do in virtual worlds can fit with the curriculum standards and objectives in many disciplines, so your administrations will approve and your students will pass their tests.
- #17 You have a lot of resources at your fingertips. Consider all the presenters at this conference and a lot of the people in today’s audience. But even if I was your only contact, you are not anywhere near being alone.
- #18 Over the past few years, I have been contacted by several universities and ministries of education to develop weekend seminars and semester-long courses for their teachers. I have been asked to train teachers on how to hybrid or fully convert their courses to virtual world courses. Today’s presentation is an abbreviated version of what you would learn in my courses. If you go to the link shown on this slide, you can get copies of some of these syllabi.
- #19 You can also go to my YouTube and Youku channels for videos of example lessons and additional resources you can use with your students.
- #20 So don’t worry about taking a lot of notes today. In addition to the resources I just mentioned, I will upload this presentation to SlideShare, and you can also contact me personally, visit my worlds in Kitely, and visit my online Kitely.com store to save yourself some building time.
- #21 Finally, you can visit my company’s website and its Facebook and Instagram pages for more insights, and I’ll attach a bibliography of useful articles to show to administrators at the end of this presentation.
- #22 Now let’s get down to basics. One of the first hurdles, you and your students must get over is simply getting into and around virtual worlds. You might think that for students learning a second language, this is a huge obstacle. But, actually, it’s an opportunity. People learn best when they really need to learn something, and if you teach them virtual skills in a target language, they’ll get plenty of useful language practice without your having to search for compelling topics.
- #23 So I start all students with a boot camp where I focus on teaching them the five things they want to learn most. I do this over three lessons, and each lesson includes gifts and games. At the end of this set of lessons, I have a better idea of the real language levels and technological competence of my students than any test would ever tell me. Today, by looking at my approach to these first three lessons, we will touch on several of the key principles I would like to stress.
- #24 The way I design my courses is by these principles: Give the students what they need and want most. Do it with games. Do it with prizes and gifts. These principles are important because highly contextualized and engaging content that appeals to a variety of intelligences is more willingly and easily learned and remembered.
- #25 So what do students want most? They want to find and make friends, talk to these friends, look cool, and, if possible, become superhuman. Because we have many levels of virtual competence looking at this presentation today, I’ll only take five minutes to briefly cover all of these skills. People who need this information can look at these slides more closely later, and all of you will benefit from getting the handouts and graphics you’ll need to easily do this with your students.
- #26 The first desired skill is to find and friend people. There are many ways to do this. You can click on the people icon at the bottom of your screen and search in the various tabs. Or you can type an avatar or group name in the search bar at the top of your screen to get information on people you know or would like to know.
- #27 You can also click on the map icon on the bottom of your screen and use its search bars, or look for the green dots that represent people. If you double-click on a green dot, you can teleport to that person.
- #28 I also highly recommend you teach your students to look at avatar profiles and create their own profiles as illustrated here.
- #29 Once you’ve found someone you would like to friend, the actual friending process is quite easy. You click on an avatar, add as friend, and okay.
- #30 The second greatest skill students will want to learn is being able to communicate with everyone. Again, there are many possible approaches to this as shown on the following handout slides. In the beginning, students will probably just text chat.
- #31 Then you can walk them through voice chatting and dealing with the type of voice problems beginners almost always have.
- #32 And finally, don’t overlook teaching your students to bubble-chat. Bubble chatting allows everyone to see what everyone else is saying when the environment is too noisy for voice chat and you don’t want to keep opening up your conversation window.
- #33 If there is anyone here who doesn’t know how to walk, run, and fly yet, please jump up and do a few handstands. LOL Actually, if you’re here now, I imagine you’ve mastered those skills. But for your students, here are some useful signs that you can post at a landing spot.
- #34 One semester I had a class that looked like this. I didn’t like it because it was difficult to tell my students apart without reading their name tags, and they didn’t like it because they wanted to be as unique as they were in real life. That brings us to the third thing students really want—changing their appearance to look cool.
- #35 You can help them with this by having a lesson where you all go shopping.
- #36 Or you can give your students gift boxes loaded with free items your students can use to change their appearances. I put boxes like this in my sandbox, along with changing booths for the unfortunate students who sometimes end up wearing the boxes, or nothing at all!
- #37 To help students with their shopping and to prevent embarrassing mishaps, I post these signs.
- #38 But clothes aren’t the only things that make a man or woman. So I also show students how to change their shapes and colors with sliders and the edit menu as shown here.
- #39 You can get some pretty funny results, which I encourage by having a Weirdest Avatar contest.
- #40 You can also get some amazing results like the avatars shown here next to their real world owners.
- #41 For ego boosts, some students choose to look like famous people.
- #42 Or like famous people trying to look like famous avatars. Just kidding, although I suppose it’s possible.
- #43 Don’t forget to increase the suave factor of your students by teaching them a few other basic skills as well, like how to sit, open doors, eat food, and dance or use other animations. It doesn’t take long, the students really appreciate it, and you will be amazed at which simple skills can give students difficulty. For example, not being a video game player in real life, I remember making my son ROFL because I spent some very long, frustrating moments staring at a stupid door I wanted to open before my son finally calmed himself down long enough to help me.
- #44 That would never happen to me now. I’m cool, and I’ve increased my coolness by going into my preferences menu and enabling: Single click on land to walk to clicked point. Double click on land to teleport to clicked point. While you’re in your preferences menu, I also recommend disabling that typing animation that no cool avatar wants running every time they enter a comment in chat.
- #45 The last skill students will want and need right away is becoming super-human by acquiring super-human sight via their camera controls. You can test them on this by placing out large boxes with hidden treasures that your students can only see, touch, and take by correctly using their camera controls.
- #46 Before we move on to the deeper curriculum issues most of you are here for, I want to make a brief comment to you, your students, and your administrators about what students need most. The games and roleplays I am about to show you may raise the eyebrows of conservative educators who often ask how what we are doing meets standards and prepares students for the work world. I’ve done a lot of research on how workplaces are changing and how education needs to change to meet our new normal. The gold words on this slide are the words that consistently pop up, and as we look at the activities I’m about to suggest, these words also consistently describe what the students will be doing. So never let anyone assume that fun activities can’t also be extremely valuable.
- #47 To be specific, using games in your classes is a good idea because: Students like them. Students are less self-conscious about using a new language when playing a game. Games can test students as well as the more ubiquitous and more disliked quizzes and tests. Future recall is enhanced because the learning was fun.
- #48 The easiest way to start using games in virtual worlds is by adapting some of the flat board games we grew up with. For example, you could make many versions of a Snakes and Ladders game that students could walk on.
- #49 Other large, flat objects, like maps, also lend themselves to games. You can call out a trivia question and have students commit to their answers by walking to the map, country, or state they think is being described. Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, map 1 represents the proportion of people who speak English as a first language in each of the areas. Map 2 represents how rapidly and where the English language is spreading. And to give you an idea of the size of map 3, my avatar is standing on Spain, just to the right of the number 3.
- #50 Flat board games are simple enough for small children or can become quite complicated and use higher order thinking skills, like this logic board game.
- #51 And here’s a fairly complicated plot-creation game and some of the game cards that go with it.
- #52 Instead of moving themselves around a board, students could be asked to move objects. For instance, in the upper left of this slide is an irregular verb tense game. Students must try to build a bridge across the board by correctly giving irregular past tenses for the words on the spaces they wish to occupy. In the lower right of this slide is an idioms puzzle. 20 squares must be arranged into a large rectangular shape in which all the idioms on the cards end up next to their definitions.
- #53 It is possible to address any grammar point with a game. You can play checkers where pieces can only be jumped if the subjects and verbs written on them are in agreement. You can work on conditionals with a honey comb game where students are given half of a conditional and must place a marker on the logical second half.
- #54 You can work on difficult indefinite pronouns with a tic tac toe game, or on the multitude of ways we can make good definitions with a definition chart race. And any vocabulary or grammar can be practiced by having students make good sentences for the words they want to add to or remove from a tower of wooden blocks.
- #55 In addition, there are many variants of dominoes that you could make to focus on anything that comes in pairs, like words and their definitions, dates and events, or equations and their solutions. In the dominoes game shown here, the teams take turns making words by matching up roots with prefixes and suffixes.
- #56 In contrast, the dominoes game on this slide involves pairing up humorous conditionals that illustrate Murphy’s law, which proclaims that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
- #57 Another game from our childhoods is Tangram where seven basic shapes must be rearranged to make a new object. This game is easy to re-create and allows students to practice giving and following directions.
- #58 A possible variant of Tangram is this COIK game. Students are placed on opposite sides of a cityscape wall and must defuse a bomb by describing what’s in front of them so well that a partner can re-create the arrangement perfectly.
- #59 While flat games are a good starting point, turning flat games into 3D games is even more compelling. Consider that walking on a flat pathway is not nearly as dramatic as walking on the same pathway high in the air.
- #60 So here is a 3D version of our earlier tangram game. Instead of just moving shapes, students are building a house.
- #61 And here is a large 3D version of a rummy game. Students draw word cards and try to make sentences. Their sentences are short to begin with, then other students increase the length of the sentences by rummying in appropriate words from their own card hands.
- #62 In real life, you could never set a building on fire for a lesson, but the game on this slide does. The game board is occupied by a 3D house with a transparent roof, so everyone can easily see what’s going on, and the students put on firefighter uniforms to increase their immersion.
- #63 In real life, you also couldn’t build a city-size Monopoly game for a lesson. Here is a modified version of the classic board game that incorporates more roleplaying and vocabulary and grammar review. If you answer a language or grammar question correctly, you are allowed to roll the dice, and bid on the property you land on after all players have walked into and inspected the property.
- #64 Current and past TV and radio shows can also be incorporated into virtual lessons. Build or buy a TV studio, and switch different game walls in and out to use it for a variety of games.
- #65 Finally, you can play field sports for the vocabulary and idioms found in their rules, and after that, you can make field movement dependent on answering questions related to whatever you are trying to teach.
- #66 I love giving students what they want and playing games with them, but my favorite activities are more complex adventures or tasks. These activities are more like the video games many of our students are already familiar with. Once you have several in-world settings, you are ready to do these. And if a lesson ever starts to lag, throw in a few twists like having students change their roles, genders, species, races, or ages. You could also switch the country or time period of the event or even add an accident, explosion, or wild animal halfway through.
- #67 For example, I might have the students agree on and plan trips to places inside my virtual worlds or real world places, and then make posters or travel brochures like the ones shown in these photos.
- #68 Or I might put the students up in hotels where the rooms are too small or have sparse or broken furniture or rats or broken pipes or ghosts or loud neighbors. The students become both the guests and hotel staff, check in, go to their rooms, discover the problems, and come downstairs and try to get the problems resolved by making requests to helpful and non-helpful staff.
- #69 I might have my students visit and rate restaurants where many of the items on the menu are not available or extremely expensive or too cold or too hot or too spicy or not spicy enough or have hair or insects in them.
- #70 I might have the students become dwellers in a high crime slum, and then have town hall meetings where they argue for and prioritize what needs to be done to make their lives more bearable.
- #71 The students could find themselves in the local jail for crimes they didn’t commit, and then play the classic prisoners’ dilemma game developed by psychologists where the prisoners might or might not get lower sentences if they agree with each other on their pleas and betray or don’t betray each other.
- #72 I might let student pairs pick a car and go on a car rally where some accidents are sure to happen, so that at the end of the lesson we can have some rally winners and some accident victim roleplays.
- #73 The students could visit one of my many museums, looking for facts on the text-rich exhibit posters. For added fun, in the dinosaur museum pictured here, I can activate the dinosaurs towards the end of the lesson, and let the students try to figure out how to deal with the crisis.
- #74 In this two-part lesson, I have the students visit this space museum. Then I send the students to stay in a space hotel next to a research facility where they will design and build their own aliens.
- #75 While in virtual outer space or on virtual Earth, the students may need to visit medical centers where they can walk the halls to learn about a wide number of ailments. They then pick an ailment and go to the emergency room to receive triaged care from more advanced students who play the hospital staff.
- #76 One type of accident situation I love putting the students in is having them go on an expensive cruise that ends in a shipwreck on a deserted island. Students prepare for this by playing a survival skills game I’ve made in-world and posted on Kahoot.com. Once on the island, the students are split into survival teams. As the lesson progresses, I give the teams notecards with hints on goals they should be trying to achieve.
- #77 I also like to send students into the past for a complicated medieval power struggle. This is another two-class lesson where during classes and between classes, the students barter for loyalty, secrets, weapons, food and drink. Unfortunately, the students soon discover that loyalty and secrets may be lied about and sold more than once.
- #78 A murder must be solved in the medieval world and in several other lessons. A few years ago, my students and I made a comic book and a machinima of one of these murders—”The Untimely Death of Peter Profit.” The comic book can be viewed on my SlideShare page, and the machinima can be watched on my YouTube channel.
- #79 Any good crime lends itself to a good trial, so having a court house for the trial and jury decision process is a good idea. One crime that my students have done quite well with is based on the Lois Duncan book Who Killed Mr. Griffin. Mr. Griffin was an English teacher (gasp!) who really cared about and asked a lot of his students. A PowerPoint presentation that reviews the facts of the case and court procedures can be found at the link on this slide.
- #80 Earlier, I mentioned a machinima my students and I made, and I would like to encourage you to have your advanced students act out plays and make machinima that you can show to other students in in-world theaters. Machinima-making could easily be a semester-long project that would provide intensive language practice and a terrific souvenir that evidences the progress, creativity, and technological prowess of your students.
- #81 To aid you and your students, I’ve made several machinima and slideshows on making machinima that you can access through my YouTube channel and SlideShare pages. These tools walk students through brainstorming goals and topics, outlining then pitching an idea, storyboarding, scripting, making films from still photos, and making films from live footage.
- #82 Another semester-long project could be having students create in-world products and stores. While doing this, there is room for discussing many business English topics.
- #83 A different direction to take is to teach your students to build. This provides language-rich tasks that permit the students to show their creative and collaborative natures. For students who love this kind of activity, you could occasionally host timed building competitions. For all students, giving them these skills gives them a chance to take more control over what they can do in their classes.
- #84 Building is not hard to do, and it gives students great giving and following directions practice. It also really appeals to students who learn best when doing something with their hands. And it’s good for you to know the basics of building because inevitably there is some prop you need that you can’t find anywhere. This slide and the next few slides contain signs you can put in a sandbox to get started.
- #85 .
- #88 It is not necessary to do a huge amount of building if you don’t wish to since there is a lot available for free or purchase. But there are some things you will need that only you can provide. This is where you should spend your initial energy. Among the items you might need to create are slideshows that students can refer to review some of the key concepts they will need to succeed in your field. For my ESL students, I’ve made knowledge ring of a dozen of these slideshows that individuals or a class can refer to when needed.
- #89 The second most important item to create is question banks that you can dip into for any game. I’ve typed mine out and then uploaded them to my worlds as textures that I can give to individual students or drop onto a screen for everyone to see.
- #90 Third, especially for language teachers, you need to create plenty of boards with phrases on them that the students might in your different activities. You want them to get in the habit of looking at resources rather than interrupting conversations to ask you how to say something.
- #91 Fourth, you need field-specific spinners that can be used in many games or for quick reviews.
- #92 Similarly, you need a wide variety of dice. The dice shown here are for ESL students so they have letters, words, and pictures that could be used to guide roleplays. If you are a history teacher, you might want dice with dates and the names of important events and people. If you are a science teacher, you might want dice with the names of chemicals or phyla or experiment steps.
- #93 Regardless of what you teach, you need to create some gifts and awards. These could be buttons or ribbons or trophies or certificates as shown here. Another option is to let your students earn privileges like permission to live in a house. Or you could create a money system and stores for students to buy things in.
- #94 Finally, you might want to consider making some NPCs—robot-like characters that can give out objects or hints when touched. NPCs can also populate your world to make it more interesting, and it is not difficult to load AI scripts into them so they can converse with your students and walk or fly or dance. If your interested in learning more about making NPCs, Nara Malone has a world called Nara’s Nook where she has set out free NPC making kits. To learn how to get to Nara’s world, go to her Virtual Writer’s Colony blog using the first link on this slide. The second link is to YouTube videos Nara has made to help you.
- #95 If you would like to turn your NPCs into chatbots with artificial intelligence, go to pandorabots.com and create a free account. Then choose a base AI. You can train your AI, which means you can alter how it responds to comments and questions. For example, the NPC on this slide is sitting on a bench at the landing spot on Edutopia 2. I have trained her to tell students to get map link notecards from a box near her when anyone says hello.
- #96 Because I have students from all over the world in every class, I don’t do hybrid classes where we meet sometimes in the real world. If all my students were only from one or two places, it might be a different story. I might be tempted to have at least the first meeting in university computer labs that have techs who could help the students with technology issues.
- #97 Although I do not do hybrid classes, I do use a lot of non-virtual world technology in my classes that would be quite useful in hybrid classes. I use Moodle for course outlines and other class information. I use Quia for placement and progress tests. I use Skype to share screens for trouble shooting or viewing real world materials. Students use Google Docs to work together on longer documents, like their travel brochures or machinima outlines. I use Cloud storage, Dropbox, my webpage, and my YouTube channel to give students access to handouts and videos. I use Camtasia to make the machinima on my YouTube channel. I use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to send my students reminders and encouragement, and I use the Google blogger for students to write up summaries and reactions to what they saw and did in class. I also use online whiteboards like Twiddla, that are compatible with in-world whiteboards. Students can add comments, drawings, etc., inworld or online, whichever they find easier. And occasionally, I use Kahoot.com to make a fun activity for my students, like my survival quiz.
- #98 So we’ve talked about: Resources I have for you The basic virtual skills your students will want and need in their first few classes How to use games and adventures in subsequent classes What you need to build Resources for hybrid classes Now you just need to choose which virtual world you’re going to use, and dive in. For me this was not a difficult choice. Although Second Life has been around longer and, therefore, has a larger marketplace and more members, it is far more expensive. For an educational institution to rent a region in Second Life, the cost is $200/month. You pay 1/5 that amount for a Kitely Advanced World, which is phenomenally larger and allows you to use many, many times more prim. To make the comparison clearer, if you only wanted to pay the $40 a month a Kitely Advanced World costs, you could only buy 1/8 of a Second Life region which is 128 times smaller and has 43 times less prim.
- #99 Wherever you build a world, it should be exciting now and in the future. We can look forward to cheaper, lighter virtual reality headsets, treadmill stands that increase the healthiness of prolonged immersion, facial expression recognition, and many more improvements. I will continue to work on making what I’ve built available at conferences and in my online Kitely store, and if you would like to visit my worlds, send me an email at bmcqueen2@gmail.com,so we can work out a mutually agreeable time.
- #100 The last few slides contain a short bibliography of resources I’ve found very useful for talking to administrators and deciding how to shape the lessons I make. I’m not going to show all the slides, but know they are available in the SlideShare copy of this presentation.