The assignment requires a bit more of students than simply acting in front of the class. In fact, I'd argue that it mimics real life more, where we are not just speaking but usually doing many things simultaneously (like driving a car and talking on the cell phone!) At the same time as they are speaking English, they are manipulating a mouse and moving their avatar, choosing and using language for the communicative situation and lexical domain specific to their SL location and scene. In a classroom roleplay, students are usually just speaking to each other with minimal if any props or actions. In SL, as you'll see in this movie, they might be dancing, flying, driving a car, wearing different clothes and bodies...just about anything!
How they did it:
1) They used various free software (this one is CamStudio, which TCC provided) to record the movie off their computer.
2) Both students sat at computers side by side and logged on to SL. They ran CamStudio on one of the computers and plugged a multimedia USB headset into that same computer.
3) While each student moved her avatar around on their own computer, recording voice was done off of the one computer. They passed the headset back and forth to record their voices.
And that's it! Very simple. The students had had perhaps 4 classroom experiences in SL and completed the project with very little help from me. My contribution consisted mainly of giving them costumes and props, showing them how to go shopping at Yadni's Junkyard and other places for free stuff (where they picked up their own props) and dropping landmarks in their inventories for locations they could shoot their movie, such as Bucharest and Venice.
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