In the September edition of the Sloan-C View, a new networking community focusing on using Second Life in education was announced. Here's the blurb:
"Sloan-C is looking to gather like-minded people to participate in networking and discussion sessions in Second Life. We are in the planning phase of this endeavor and are currently gauging reaction from the Sloan-C community on what topics should be discussed and what activities should take place during these sessions."
Personally, I think it would have been neater if they came up with a way to focus on the open-source Croquet project out of MIT. I'm a little disappointed with what's happened to Second Life and all the focus on Linden dollars and buying stuff. This article from the New York Times points out how many have turned it into a mirror of the real world.
But, I suppose that what can be learned by exploring educational uses of Second Life can be translated to any multi-user virtual environment. Sloan-C also has a Ning community to support the exploration of SL.
One popular indirect teaching strategy is for students to give presentations to the class. Especially popular in teacher education classes, presentations allow students to create a lesson plan and teach it allowing for feedback from peers. There are a number of neat new tools that allow students to give presentations in an online class. One of the drawbacks, especially for teacher education, is that the presentations would be recorded and asynchronous rather than interactive. To do real-time, interactive presentations tools such as elluminate or webex are needed (though Zoho Show is offering some interesting web conferencing capabilities).
I've been looking at several tools over the past few weeks trying to figure out what to recommend to online faculty. TeacherTube provides students (and teachers) the ability to easily stream digital video just as YouTube does but without all the stupidity. If your student has access to a digital video camera, TeacherTube is one way he can make a presentation to the class.
Two other options include SlideShare and VoiceThreads. With SlideShare, users with a free account can upload PowerPoint slides. Recently, the ability to add audio to a PPT turning it into a Slidecast has been added.
Here's an example of a Slidecast:
The only problem with Slidecasting at SlideShare is that the audio must be recorded separately with a program like Audacity, and then uploaded and syched with slides.
Another option is VoiceThread, a new tool where registered users (again, free) can upload images and add audio commentary right from their web browsers. It's insanely simple to use PLUS you can actually create an audio asynchronous discussion. Other users can come along and add comments to your image and comments. Follow this link to see an example of a "classroom 2.0" where folks all over the world introduce themselves. Imagine how much social presence this can add to the online classroom. Plus, it's a free and simple way to handle online student presentation projects. You can't upload PPT slides to VoiceThread, only images. However, you can easily save a PPT presentation as .gif or .jpg files.
VoiceThreads can also be embedded into other webpages like the SlideShare Slidecast above. This adds even more flexibility. If you decide to use tools like these to facilitate online student presentations, the easiest thing would be to set up a course wiki where students will embed their presentation into their respective pages.
I'm currently working on support documents for all of these, so if you are interested, let me know. Below are some preliminary docs on using PBWiki:
Good intro to PBWiki. Yes, he goes pretty fast, but it's a commercial, not training...Still, I learned more about the neat plugins that can be integrated into a wiki.
