Thursday, October 29, 2009

Halloween on PESD Island

As a treat for good work, I brought out some costumes I was able to bring over from the Second Life main grid. I have created special carts for selling special objects like flowers and teddy bears. I also got a dance ball from when Mrs. Rodriguez at Edison came over to the Teen Grid. Learning how to buy, and unpack and wear costumes is a fairly complex skill so only the students who have done all the work were able to wear costumes and dance. (See video below)



Trimester 1 Coming to an End

Our first trimester is coming quickly to a close and some of the projects haven't gotten very far. I have a better idea of how long things take now and will have the curricular projects start earlier in the next trimester. We will have a new group of students so we will have to begin again with using Gimp and beginning prim practice. (See video below)

Friday, October 23, 2009

Observation

Although I was just going to observe today, I did sneak down and explain where twist could be found on the object menu. When I do something like that, I usually just find one student I think can move ahead and teach it to them. Then we follow the "each one, teach one" method. (See videos below)





Friday, October 16, 2009

Welcome Edison Students!

Today a new group of students entered Second Life as part of the Edison School contingent. Since we are focusing quite a bit on the STEM initiative on PESD Island, they are all wearing a simple uniform of faded jeans and a school t-shirt. We just don't have enough time with this group to do the custom shirts as it is just a small part of a larger technology elective that includes important basic skills such as keyboarding, etc. We are hoping that given a taste of both Gimp and Second Life, some of these students will choose to accept an invitation back for another trimester which is geared to the building aspects of Second Life. Today they learned how to login, they did the basic tutorial, learned how to use the camera and take a snapshot of their "first look." Their homebase is the drum circle area of Edison Music Park, the home of their teacher, Mrs. Pamela Rodriguez. (See video below)