For their Secondlife assignment, students were introduced to the virtual world of Secondlife and shown examples of how realistic and detailed the virtual environment is, including a recreation of Marshall University's campus. Students created their own avatars and were able to freely explore the virtual world using the Secondlife viewer. In their reflection, one student was initially hesitant about Secondlife but became more interested after seeing the realistic graphics and ability to virtually go anywhere. They felt Secondlife could be used for critical thinking and education by allowing exploration of different places and ideas. However, they would be hesitant to have students create their own accounts due to concerns about unsupervised access, but think censoring options could help address this issue and make Second

1. Secondlife Assignment:
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For this assignment, we were made aware of the vast possibilities with the web
application Secondlife. We saw examples of the ability to do really anything that would could do
in real life, in this virtual world. A video of Marshall University’s campus on Secondlife showed
the attention to design and how realistic the virtual work actually is. We were interacted to creat
our own avatar on Secondlife, and simply explore. We used a Secondlife viewer and got to just
explore the virtual world.
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Secondlfe Reflection:
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In the beginning I was a little hesitant to the idea of Secondlife. I had heard of these
virtual worlds before, but I never found them appealing. To be honest, the idea of a virtual work
where people interact with each other seemed a little strange to me. This was until we were
shown the possibilities on Secondlife. The realistic graphics of this virtual life combined with the
ability to create or go anywhere you could imagine, suddenly became very appealing. For this
aspect of Secondlife, I would place this assignment in the critical thinking pillar of 21st century
education. A person using Secondlife, literally has the world in their hands (mouse and keypad).
This opens up many doors or education through these virtual worlds. In my classroom, I could
use Secondlife as a way to show and explain different places and ideas. Though I do not think,
with the freedom it provides right now, I would have a class of students actually create their own
account. I would be afraid of them assessing their account outside of the classroom. Censoring

2. options will soon be available, I believe. This would give children the opportunity to explore
while being supervised. So if there was a way to avoid this problem with censoring, it would be a
perfect learning and exploration tool.