NMC Campus Observer

Preparing for Faculty Tour of NMC Campus

Danielle Damone (aka Danielle Mirliss) : Jul 26, 2006 03:49pm

As Heidi TeeCee (aka Heidi Trotta) I prepare for Seton Hall’s educational gaming day, appropriately titled “Enhancing Learning and Collaboration Through Play”, we thought we would share with you a few resources that we found to make our guests feel special.  Our virtual field trip is part of a series of faculty development day-long workshops that Seton Hall’s Teaching Learning and Technology Center hosts throughout the summer.  The resources that we will share with you could also be used for students (see Angela Thomas’ blog i-Anya to see how she is preparing to teach in SL).
 
One way to welcome your guests to SL is to create a gift box or bag filled with landmarks and wonderful freebies.  This is very similar to the gift bag located in the Aho Museum but it came to our attention (credit goes to Anya for this one) that you can also buy a purse from a little magic shop that allows you to fill the bag with items from your inventory and then share these items with others.  If you are more adventurous (or save each linden for shopping excursions) you can easily create a free gift giving box.  In our many shopping adventures in SL we somehow collected some wonderful gift boxes and bags that we were able to modify.  After we got the script working we decided to make a box with the Seton Hall logo – again all easy to create.  (If you would like a tutorial just leave a comment to this post) You can find the gift giving script at simteach.com - give all cotents script.

We filled our gift bag with various educational and entertainment landmarks and note cards.  Depending on your audience you might want to recommend stores where a new individual to Second Life can acquire some nice clothes, hair, etc.  Some other items that we included where books shared by Larry Pixel (Thinc sells everything necessary to make your own books), an interactive whiteboard (provided by Angrybeth Shortbread), a seating stadium (provided by Jeremy Kabumpo), an event timer, a car, sailboat, parachute, and a BMW.  You can find many of the educational items at the ICT Library – many of the other items can be acquired by simply exploring many of the shops in Second Life. 

What SL tour would be complete without a free T-Shirt?  Luckily a very easy tutorial and template exists on the web that allowed us to create this beautiful Seton Hall pirate t-shirt that would make any undergrad jealous!  Just follow the directions and upload your logo and you can also make T-shirts for your campus.  Thank you Robinwood.com!! http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html

Finally, a welcome sign would be create a warm welcome to the campus.  I created one using a white board that I found at the ICT library.  Again, you could create one with the building tools provided in SL but why reinvent the wheel (especially since you are creating your own gift box, right?). 
 
We will be sure to let you all know who our event turns out.  Stay tuned…

Story filed under: Do It Yourself, Resources & Information, Teaching and Learning

See all stories by Danielle Damone (aka Danielle Mirliss)