The screenshot of my avatar in the SL
Second Life (SL) is a fascinating virtual world but could be a burden to teachers too. Depending on the target students, e.g. age, gender, socioeconomic status, it has limitations when teachers want to implement, e.g. bandwidth, speed, and timeframe. The teachers need to know the functions and purpose clearly, or it's a time-consuming game and could be replaced by another approach.
On the other hand, if teachers can provide well-design orientation for students, in SL students can explore endless possibilities. Through multimodality, students can 1) communicate with others by text/ chat; 2) detect the environment and take action by the symbols, signs' fonts, colors, and size. And these elements all pay the way for reading, writing, comprehension, social interaction, self-learning.
they also learn how to collaborate with peers
ReplyDeleteIt's true, but to me, it seems more complicated if you need to screen the "peers", you know what I meant.
DeleteWeek 7 Assignments # 3 Comment
ReplyDeleteThe pros of SL virtual world are the multimodal texts such as its word processing, moving images sound effects, and body expressions of avatars
My two foremost cons with SL virtual world is that it takes too much time to load and those naked avatars. The naked avatars are not appropriate for kids.
I agree with that, it made me a little bit of frustrated when I moved in a zombie way and take too much time to figure out the rule and all functions.
DeleteI agree the possibilities are truly endless for students using this virtual world there a many way in which students can express their creativity from their avatar to their environment.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I am not a tech-savvy, in my opinion, I still believe teachers can meet the goal without the tech, but with tech-assistance, I believe it might work efficient in some way.
DeleteGreat job. I totally agree with you that the multimodality is benefitial for students to integrate reading, writing, comprehension and sefl-learning. It offers interesting and engaging way for students to learn.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I got enchanted too when I first time saw this type of book!
DeleteI agree that using SL can be very limiting. It seems like it can take a lot of time out of one's lesson plan because it takes awhile to get each user set on the same location to do the actual lesson. Also I think some of the content is too mature for children in younger grades (primary education) so I would have to look up different types of virtual learning environments to introduce my students to new literacies.
ReplyDeleteWonderful discussion here. You guys presented great point of concerns. Read this article: Cape Cod schools teach on a virtual "island."(http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3749877). Now Schrock is the proprietor of Lighthouse Learning Island, a state-of-the-art center for tech education and professional development for teachers, located somewhere in the cyber world of Second Life, the online virtual community. Interesting to read...
ReplyDelete