Using SL videos offline (in the RL classroom!)

Here's a great way to get students speaking spontaneously and authentically in the classroom! Run a SecondLife movie from one of the students and have the student talk about it as it's running.

There are a couple of ways to do this. You can have the students make a movie and then prepare a presentation about it, or you can have the students speak extemporaneously. Or you can save the movies yourself to a CD or external hard drive and bring it with you to class.

It provides authentic, student-generated content for writing and speaking. Just today, I was going to introduce the present progressive tense to JK. I showed her the verb tense and explained what it was for, then played some video segments from the day she turned into a blue wolfperson and raced around Yadni's Junkyard naked on a motorcycle. I asked, "What is your avatar doing?" JK answered with short sentences in present progressive. We had a good time, and she produced a lot of language accurately.