Getting Ready for the Reaction Grid

I have been spending my vacation prepping for 4th graders at Lowell School and their first visit to the virtual world called the Reaction Grid. I have strengthened my friendships with teachers from Michigan, etc. who have already brought students in to work. It is very much like Second Life, but focusing heavily on elementary education. Since our classes are larger than can be accommodated by the grid, students will be sharing avatars unlike the middle school students who have their own avatars on our Second Life Teen island. This means that students will learn how to collaborate more closely, be resilient when there are technical issues, and be creative with the tools within the grid. We will use the same tools that the middle school kids use, but will expect a different level of sophistication at this grade level. (See videos below)

Winter Wonderland in the Desert

Since it's really only sweater weather here in Phoenix, I thought it might be fun for the students to build virtual snowmen today. They also got free skates so they could skate while building, but none of them really noticed all the WORK they were doing while they were having FUN!! As always, the kids took snapshots and then sent them to me via their epal accounts. (See videos below)

Early December Building

We ran into a couple of snags this week when both classes ended up losing an entire class period due to bus evacuation drills. We get less than two hours a week, so this didn't help. Some students had to start over on the tables because they did not clone the prims, or they cloned them and then moved them to the side which makes it difficult to align them again. Getting a bird's eye view helps line things up with the grid on the workspace, but kids are only using a touch pad and it is more difficult to build without a mouse. Things too far out of alignment do not get the full 10L for the day's building. A few curricular projects began this week too. (See videos below)

Learning to Texture Specific Faces of a Prim

We continued our basic prim work by learning how to select specific faces of a prim for texturing. If you are building a house, you certainly don't want the inside of the house to look like the outside so you can put bricks, stone, or siding on the outer face of the wall, and wallpaper or plaster on the inner face. Students will create a window that fits into the hollow space and texture it with one of the many glass textures they have available from the Lowell Depot. (See video below)

Login, Chat, Create, Stretch, Hollow, Rotate, Texture & Snap Pic

I got to meet this group last week when they were working on Gimp, but today I had the great fun of seeing yet another group of kids as they took their first steps in Second Life. Looking at their faces as they login and see their virtual selves is something not to be missed. This group got right to work learning to do everything in the post title. Oh, they also learned to retrieve their passwords from their epal accounts :) (See video below)

Clone, Align, Taper, and Twist

Students today concentrated on cloning prims by using the shift/click/pull method. They learned about twist and taper, and making sure their prims were linked so multiple pieces can be moved as a single unit. Two days later, these students learned how to hollow, rotate, stretch, and name their objects. (See videos below)

The Students Take Over

This week Amy and Carla volunteered to teach the new students how to use Gimp to create their name in BLING for their Second Life t-shirts. I stood back and tried not to butt in too much :) I remember wanting to help my friends so much in school only to have my teacher tell me, "Miss Spack! I am the teacher, not you! Go back to your seat!" (big sigh of defeat and I didn't decide to become a teacher until I was well past college age and I gave a presentation on The Print Shop at the Milwaukee Educational Computing Association) I want our students to think teaching is a great thing to do, so I make sure they get chances to help each other without doing the work for the other students. Amy and Carla had help from several of the boys who decided to come back for another trimester also. It's great to see them cooperating and being there for each other. (See video below)