The Story of My “Second Life”

Ok, so it’s time for the virtual rubber to meet the digital road…

Students return to school this week, and we’re thinking about putting together an after-school Teen Second Life club for 8th graders. If I *taught* eighth grade, I’d probably find a way to bring my own classes in, but, this is going to have to do.

We are presently exploring three possibilities:

1. Partnering with the Schome Park project in the U.K.;
2. Joining Westley Field’s Skoolaboate initiative; or
3. Creating our own space at the Firesabre/Global Kids Virtual World Campus

My current thinking, along with some insight from Schome Park veterans, is posted on their discussion forum, here. The machinima video below provides a nice overview of Schome Park project:

And, here is a page of photos from Westley’s Skoolaborate project. I particularly like this one, which depicts a group of teens learning from each other on a task (designing furniture) as framed by the teacher.

Controlling our own destiny with a plot at Virtual World Campus is also appealing but the ready-made collaboration offered by these other projects is very, very tempting.

Since students are back this week, I need to get a proposal ready for our local Education Foundation, and then advertise the club … and prepare for a parent/student/community orientation/SL demo.

The overall objective would be to have the students immerse themselves in SL, acquire skills, then demo the educational potential for teachers in an after-school workshop. From there, who knows where things might end up … our own island? Expanding the collaboration to allow other local districts in, including perhaps our high school?

I gotta get started writing that proposal…

-kj-