Comments on my blog and the lesson plans are very welcome. However, please, keep in mind that this is my first experience with teaching in Second Life. As far as I know, there is no other such project where an SL language teacher makes their lessons plans and reflections on their teaching available to public scrutiny. This is not an easy step, especially as it is also my business and this is like giving away internal business information for free. People get fired for this ;) However, I hope this will help me improve and will help other (future) SL language teachers get started more easily and offer quality lessons in SL. My intention is also to lead by example and I hope that other teachers will follow suit.
Your comments and constructive criticism will make this project more valuable.
Language teachers are welcome to use the lessons and provide feedback on how they worked out.
Copyright
You may download and make photocopies of the lesson plan files provided on the Website for personal use as a reference in class. However, You may not (without prior written permission from me) redistribute any of the content of the Website or supply it to other people (including by using it as part of any library, archive, intranet or similar service); remove the copyright notice; create a database in electronic or structured manual form by systematically downloading and storing all or any of the content; modify, reproduce, sell, lend, hire out or in any way commercially exploit any of the content.
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I met Scottlo Scorbal , an English language teacher and podcaster based in Japan, when he signed up for the Virtual Worlds & Language Learning session that I co-moderated with three colleagues. Scottlo, reflected on what we did in the VWLL session with podcasts here and here. He was on of the VWLL participants who planned their first SL lesson and did a peer-teaching lesson during the VWLL session. A video recording of this lesson can be viewed here. I learned that he has been podcasting for four years now and uses podcasting (audio journals) with his students, too. Scott is also on Twitter. Scottlo invited me to do a podcast with him and talk a bit about language learning and teaching in Second Life. You can find the result on his blog Meet Scottlo Scorbo. Thanks Scottlo for giving me this opportunity!
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.
