Change bLog

The Newsround website is featuring a story about a school using second life for lessons.

Children taught in Second Life

Interestingly, in the video, they claim that “Acklam Grange is the first school in the country to use Second Life for lessons”, which I’m not sure is true.

Whilst I agree that Second Life has a great deal of potential, I’ve not been able to use it in my teaching yet. I would be interested to discover that this isn’t the first school to use Second Life, and how successful other people have been at using it in an educationally beneficial way.

Having recently upgraded to a MacBook Pro, I can now run Second Life without being randomly logged out and delivered back to the newbie island, as happened on my previous MacBook. So, I’ve given it a go. I have a bit of a problem with it though, I have no idea what to do. I wander around quite happily, enjoying the ability to fly and looking at what people have created. However, all of my instant messenger and social networking contacts are people I previously knew offline, in the real world. This makes wandering around an online world quite difficult because I’m not used to making new friends in cyberspace. I probably need to do some research into the benefits of Second Life, but when I’m there, I don’t know where to start. Any ideas anyone?

In terms of educational benefit, I can see how Second Life might be helpful. See Steve Beard’s Blog for more info.

It’s good to be blogging again!