[Patricia BlackMember]

Thanks for all the resouces, Allisyn! I’ll be reading the “Best Practices for Using Games…in the classroom” article (http://tinyurl.com/lerpeo) as soon a possible. One of the game platforms they mention is designing virtual worlds, which I would love to find out more about. What an amazing addition that would be to a classroom, especially one equipped with an interactive whiteboard. If anyone knows of resources for beginning Virtual World designers, I would be very eager to hear about them.

[allisynKey Master]

Thanks, Patricia! I recently met a dynamic teacher who’s passionate about virtual worlds. Check out some of her work – Peggy Sheehy:
http://peggysheehy.edublogs.org/about/
Maybe she’d be willing to do a guest blog post or webinar…

[davidgKey Master]

Virtual worlds like Second Life, Teen Second Life, Club Penguin, Habbo, Whyville, Tootsville, Poptropica rise and fall in popularity constantly but as a platform/tool they remain popular and most effective for education and training purposes. Educators like Peggy Sheehy have created spaces for specific use within virtual worlds like Ramapo Islands which she created within Teen Second Life. Demonstrations tools like PhET Simulations can be created with tools like Wolfram’s Mathmatica. 3D modeling tools like the Google’s free program Sketch-up, or sculptris, can be used to create objects to use within Virtual worlds. But, the best new tool I have read about recently is Blue Mars a virtual world creation tool that teachers at American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) piloted at their Virtual Worlds Institute in 2010. The Virtual Worlds Institute is digital media-based summer camp for middle schoolers in which teachers are challenging students to visualize dinosaurs prehistoric worlds.

Here is an article on the program with links to many of the tools I just highlighted- http://www.gamesforchange.org/2011/08/virtual-worlds-institute-amnh-g4c/

[Author]

Posts