Teaching in Second Life

As mentioned in my previous post, today my colleagus and I presented at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices Conference in Second Life about our 6-week online teacher training session Virtual Worlds & Language Teaching. Many of our VWLL participants were present and supported us and I’d really like to thank them for this and for being such active participants during the session.

The roundtable was attended quite well although we had almost nobody from the US because it was too early in the morining on a Sunday

Although it was announced as a roundtable, it was more a presentation with a Q&A session at the end. We had many positive comments from the audience and it was obvious that there was interest from the questions we received. However, we did not have a discussion about language learning/teaching in SL or more specificially about teacher training in SL. I don’t know whether this was due to time constrainsts or whether participants needed time to digest what they had seen and were told. Maybe we, the presenters, could have asked some questions back to the audience. This will be something that I will think about before our next presentation.

Here are our presentation slides (not in any particular order):

And here are some snapshots from the presentation (courtesy of Carol Rainbow):

The session has finished and the presentation is over but the VWLL community in our Ning and in SL is still vibrant and interested language teachers are welcome to join.

While this blog is about my personal Second Life teaching experiences, explorations and experiments, there is also a SLexperiments language teachers group, which I founded together with two wonderful colleagues of mine, Alicia Barbitta and Maru del Campo. We started to meet regularly in Second Life to help each other learn SL skills, share our resources and discuss language teaching and learning in Second Life.

While there are many educator groups in Second Life, the SLexperiments group focuses specifically on language teaching and learning. This has attracted many language teachers and also some teacher trainers, scripters and researchers. We have grown to over 80 members and have met regularly every Friday at 11am SLT since spring 2008. 

We have had many good discussions, helped each other acquire SL skills, gone on field trips and shared many tools and resources in-world and on our wiki.

I want to thank Alicia, Maru, Carol, Dennis, Steve, Gavin, Daf, Nelba, Graham, Ismail, James, Michael, Birgit, Minhaaj, David, Nellie, Vance and all the other members, regular and irregular participants for making the SLexperimens meetings such a pleasurable experience where we not only learned a lot together but also socialised and had lots of fun. You have all made my Second Life richer and I have learned a lot from and with you.

I wish you wonderful holidays and hope to see you all again next year.