Practical Examples of 3D Virtual Environments for Learning in High School

Eight weeks after our students first entered our 3D virtual world, called 'Booralie', I can now say we have a suite of learning activities to showcase. We use 'Second Life' software to run this environment.

In this video I show a wide range of examples of how students are learning in this space, both in student-directed ways (developing high-order skills such as creativity, collaboration and project-management) but also in structured, teacher-directed ways. 

I show activities we've run that are specific to Maths, Visual Arts, Music, and Languages, but also plenty of activities that are generic and transferable across different subject areas and ages - especially discussion based activities that rely on text chatting.

Every single one of the activities meets my two golden criteria of being low effort (for the teacher) but high impact (for the students). We've avoided the sort of activity whereby you spend hours recreacting the city of Paris or Ancient Rome for the students for one fabulous lesson. Instead we ask 'what are the inbuilt potentials in the rules of this world? Text chat quizzes are a good example. The Poinkey's Pods speed dating discussion tool is another classic. These ideas harness the potentials of the environment for learning with very little prep time.

This video is the culmination of an extraordinarily busy term. It has been the ride of my life, utterly exhilarating. It has been bliss learning new teaching skills.

Picture me in the first few lessons with my Year 8 French class trying to manage them all in the virtual world... figuring out how to get them to the same place on the island, working out what instructions work well and which work poorly. I hit the jackpot when we opened up the disco and I realised that students feel under pressure if just asked to 'chat in French', but will gibber away blissfully while on a virtual dance floor. 

Then there is our virtual radio station, virtual art gallery, the upcoming customisable maths maze, our virtual bookstore, and so on and so on.

I finish in the video remarking that this sort of environment is obviously not the be all and end all. It is simply a teaching tool, or learning space, that deserves inclusion in a teacher's repetoire. Students relate naturally to this sort of virtual environment. They're hyper-engaged by it. Many students spend many hours in similar environments outside school time.

I strongly argue that there doesn't have to be anything light-weight about activities in a virtual world. Activities in a physical classroom can be light-weight, or intense and productive. The same goes for a virtual space.

I welcome comments or questions. Leave a comment on this post or tweet me at www.twitter.com/steve_collis . To hear from me in future - subscribe on the right hand side of this page with your email address, and you'll receive future posts in your inbox.

Finally, A Phone Blogging Service to Replace Utterli?

I've been busting to post about this for a few weeks. I was so annoyed when Utterli cut their services, because I had seen how easy it is to get students to use their phones for learning.

A company called 'Learnosity' has a fully functional voice learning system that requires only a telephone for students to use.

First, the teacher logs in at a computer and records some audio questions into a website (no software required, the audio goes straight into the website).

For languages, this could be a question the students need to answer in the target language, but I can envisage History or English teachers elliciting student responses on a range of topics. Students could be asked to defend a perspective, with evidence, or define their opinions, or deliver a persuasive speech.

Then students simply ring a local telephone number and listen to the teacher and then record their responses. They can re-record if they want to. The teacher can set the service to ask a particular set of questions.

When the teacher goes to the website, they see an interface like this:

For question 1, the teacher can see all the student responses running down the page.

The teacher can leave some text feedback for the student (which they can get by logging in).

They can assign a mark to each question (useful for official assessment tasks).

They can nominate certain responses as 'sample' responses - these ones are tagged as ideal responses and can be listened to by the other students.

I'll use this service systematically next term, getting all my students to ring up once a week and answer a whole bunch of questions. I'll identify some 'sample' answers - some excellent answers that the others can then log in and listen to.

Notice there is an RSS and an iTunes symbol on the page? Students and staff can subscribe over iTunes to the teacher recordings and student responses! I've been experimenting to see if I can then embed the iTunes feed into another website. Basically, yes I can, I just need to figure out how to do it more elegantly. Those of you looking for a viable alternative to Utterli, the mobile phone blogging system who have annoyingly cancelled their local phone numbers, will realise this system has potential to let students run mobile phone blogs, that can even be subscribed to.

This system meets my requirements of being:

1. Efficient (easy, low time input, and much easier than managing computer headsets)

2. High impact - because students need more speaking training. This is a real axe I wish to grind. I don't think most teachers to oral literacy well. And yet arguably the students' ability to express themselves, to persuade, to present themselves in a certain light, will have a life-long impact on their opportunities. Everything from finding a partner to finding a job is affected by speaking confidence.

Yet, often, teachers neglect speaking skills, except for a fob-off class speech once a year, where the students panic and get emotionally scarred!

This system offers regular speaking scaffold to truly impact student speaking confidence. 

Want to give it a try?

This service is essentially a 'start-up' service, i.e. it works fine but the company are looking to build a userbase. My contact, Mr Mark Lynch, is happy for other teachers to use it on a demonstration basis. There is no pricing schedule available yet. I'm impressed enough to be happy to fork out some cash to make this a standard component of my French classes. My students always need more speaking practice.

If you want a demonstration account, email Mark Lynch from Learnosity - marklynch (AT) gmail.com

I'll keep you posted as I use the system over the coming term!

Low Effort High Impact - A Year 6 Class Publishes Story

Hi everyone. I am working on some big blog posts on:

1. A powerful new phone service I've discovered allowing teachers to record themselves over the phone, and then students ring, listen, and respond. All this can equally be accessed through a website. 

2. Our 3D island and all the weird, wonderful, unexpected, and exciting ways students and teachers have used this environment for learning.

But for now... just a quick word about web publishing. I know I've posted about it before - but this technique just keeps coming back to me and is becoming my basic 'bread and butter' application of technology in the classroom. 

The technique: create a website and feed student output into it for the world to see.

This is the simplest technique in the world. Go to wordpress.com & you'll establish a free website within about 2 to 3 minutes.

From there, publishing student work is a matter of 'copy and paste'. 

It's a low effort, high impact technique. Teachers don't have time for showy tech tricks that take time and effort. If they're going to use technology it will have to be hyper-efficient, requiring only a very small amount of time and effort, but yielding an excellent impact on student learning.

The impact on student learning comes from their awareness of having a global audience. They get a map on their website with red dots showing location of visitors, and they get a counter showing how many visitors have come to their website.

Case in point - Mr Tim Stanwell approached me after hearing about this idea, suggesting his Primary class publish a science fiction story they had written.

I visited their class this morning and showed them how to post material to their website: http://ringoftime.wordpress.com . This took about 20 minutes. 

Since then, just today, they published a prologue and two chapters of their story. I mentioned it on Twitter mid-morning.

By this evening the website has had 170 visitors, and 6 or 7 comments. The kids are amazed. The teacher is amazed. Frankly, I'm amazed. 

Imagine how this has affected these students' thinking about what they write. This isn't practise, it's for real. They have a readership. What they say matters. It reframes the way they perceive their studies. It matters now. They have something to say, a platform to say it on, and an audience to listen, NOW!

This technique adapts to any age group, any subject. It's super easy, takes very little training (15 to 30 minutes), no planning or programming (you just take what students were creating anyway, and publish it), and very little maintenance time (just copy and paste student work into the website and click 'publish').

So, you know, I'll be blogging soon on some pretty spectacular tools, but very high in my mind at the moment is still web publishing. It's low effort, high impact, and perfect for empowering and inspiring students.

Examples from my school:

Year 5/6 Sci Fi story http://ringoftime.wordpress.com

Year 2 http://www.nbcsgreenfingers.com

Year 9/10 Geography http://australianenvironment.wordpress.com

Year 11 French Novel 'The Little Prince' study guide  http://frenchonlinelittleprince.wordpress.com

Year 11 Wordsworth Poetry analysis and reflections - http://wordsworthreflections.wordpress.com 

Setting up a School Internet Radio Station

Well, I am in the best mood ever!

With very little fiddling around, I've set up an internet radio station for my school.

Once set up, you simply upload some MP3 sound files, and people who tune into the radio station hear them broadcast live.

To listen in, go to http://shoutcast.com/directory/search_results.jsp?searchCrit=simple&s=Booralie and click 'Tune In!' (At the time of publishing this post, most the of the content has been made by me. The station is only a few hours old. In a few days we'll have student content, and I'll blog again about it).

In our case, we then nominate our radio station as the media stream to play in our 3D virtual world (which we call 'Booralie Island', using the Second Life program. Our students and teacher use this space in parrallel with the physical space of the classroom. It is early days, but a strong community has sprung up).

 [here a student has a created a huge version of the periodic table]

 Anyway, back to the radio station...

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!
- drama students broadcasting entertaining radio plays
- music students recording their compositions
- students of ANY subject, ANY age recording entertaining educational recordings.
- English students speaking from the perspective of a character in the text they're studying, or giving a book review.
- recorded debates
- health and diet tips from students studying nutrition
- students read their creative writing or poetry
- history students retell historical events in a dramatic mode!
- study tips, pretend advertisements, and so on!

Students create MP3 files with a headset (cheap headsets work fine, by the way) and free 'Audacity' software available here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

HOW TO SET UP AN INTERNET RADIO STATION
The way I did it:

1. Set up an internet server that will run your station for you. Go to http://shoutcast.setnine.com/ and decide how many people you want to be able to listen to the station at the same time, and at what quality. I think you want at least 'Bit Rate: 64 Kbps' but any higher than costs more with little increase in quality. We selected 25 listeners maximum. Click on what you want and then you'll have to pay by PayPal or credit card. I paid on credit card and will claim the money back from school.

THE COST FOR MY OPTIONS - $37.50 US per month (or about 60 Australian Dollars)

2. Once setnine.com has set you up (it took them 3 days for me), you'll be emailed a username and password. You log into the website when you want, and upload your audio files. You can create playlists and set them to play on a loop in a certain order, or you can even 'DJ', using the software WINAMP, to run your station live.

To listen to our radio station, click here and then click on "Tune In!"

It won't be hard to maintain and run the station. I'll get a pool of audio files from various teachers, or even direct from inspired students. I simply upload them to the website, and the radio server does the rest!

Web 2.0 Services Pulling the Rug Out

It has now been three