Roleplays in Second Life

My advanced grammar students prepared roleplays designed around target grammar, for example, modals of advice & obligation, passive voice, perfect tenses, etc. I gave them the choice of acting in front of the class or acting in Second Life. Two of five groups chose the Second Life option.

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.

How to put on costumes in Second Life

My students in advanced grammar & conversation are required to give a 3-minute presentation according to the course learning outcomes. This quarter, they have the option to write dialogues that include target grammar from the quarter and making movies in Second Life. Of course, I offer the alternative of a live class performance...But I'm hoping that SecondLife will be an attractive option for the less-extroverted students. Plus, I've got lots of great props, costumes, and locations for filming. Who can resist? Here's a video I made to help them prepare for their presentation next week.

great Web 2.0 resources for language teachers

I found this excellent website with a list of teacher training videos for free, fun Web 2.0 tools for language teachers. Four of them are specific to teaching ESL. There's a wealth of information here about sites that allow students to create cartoon videos and write their own scripts; pronunciation, listening, and reading websites; digital poster creation tools; and a lot more.

An alternative to narrated Powerpoints

I'm trying something new. I've recorded a lecture for my students in SecondLife. Well, first a little context: for the past year, I've been adding some UDL (Universal Design Learning) components to my grammar class to help my students, some of whom need more time to process the lectures and material. I started creating narrated Powerpoint lectures using Elluminate in the fall. Mainly, I chose Elluminate because I don't have an Articulate license. Elluminate is OK but a bit unwieldy...Not a pretty presentation, not full-screen, and many students have trouble opening the files at home because they require Java. That's not a difficult fix, but try explaining to someone with minimal computer experience that they need to download "Java" when they get home. Anyway...I recently had another idea. Check out this video I shot in SecondLife on Evergreen Island. It's actually the second of three: in the first, I give a (yes!) Powerpoint lecture in SecondLife, then move over here to the demonstration area to give some examples, then in the third movie, go over to a screen with an online quiz for practice. So I move through the early steps of presentation: introduce, demonstrate, guided practice.