NMC Campus Observer

Gadgets Galore! That’s the Buzz!

Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes) : Feb 6, 2008 03:30am

On Monday Feb 4 at the Teachers Buzz on the NMC Labs sim, we were treated to a fantastic selection of useful gadgets for learning and teaching in Second Life.

Willow Shenlin got us off to a great start by sharing her bilingual dictionary modified from an SL Glossary. This is keyword searchable by typing in to chat and it also provides a link to an mp3 file so you can hear the word being spoken! The one she demoed was Lakhota/English but other bilingual dictionaries can be made! You can get a notecard of all the instructions for using this simply by typing “glossary help” (minus the quotation marks) when you are close to the dictionary. Go get your copy now from NMC Labs where this and other gadgets will be available for the next few days. Let’s hope some of our SL language teacher community will start providing these bilingual dictionaries for other languages. Their production would make for great student projects, becoming fantastic in-world resources, expecially when combined with SL’s Babbler! Also check out the Lakhota Language booth in International Plaza on Info Island International. Great work Willow!

Sendao Goodman was next with a number of gadgets including a teleport tool called Solar TP, which can be used for tours, or moving around to different student project presentations near the end of a course in SL. He also gifted us, and our students, with a texture organizer and a trivia tool. Finally, he shared a slide viewer he scripted from Lyr Lobo’s work, which pre-loads the slides (textures) in the background, resulting in almost zero delay for the image to resolve when moving on to the following slide! His bag of goodies also contains a holodeck but he didn’t have time to demo this, so a great set of gadgets to go and pick up. Thanks Sendao!

We then moved on to 3D mindmapping with Butch Dae. Based on ones created in 2D software, this 3D version starts off with a sphere, which,when clicked, rezzes an ‘hourglass’ for each topic. The owner can control whether the tool can be for private or public access. There can be up to eight levels of topics (nodes) within the mind map and you can drill down into each topic and back up again. Information about a particular topic can be obtained from typing a command in chat (Open Detail). Once no more additional hourglasses appear, you’ve drilled down as far as you can go for that mindmap. Like the other gadgets, this one seems to have great potential for collaborative student group work. Full instructions are on a notecard, which along with the the VIT mindmapping tool itself, can be picked up from the south west corner of the central area of the NMC Labs sim. Our thanks Butch!

Next came NMC’s CDB Barkley who shared a couple of gadgets. One was a random avatar prize giver, with scripting work by Sendao Goodman. A list of avatar names are placed on a notecard inside the Prize Giver and chosen at random from this list … hmm random formation dance teams anyone? The other gadget he showcased was an image annotator he created based on script work by Ann Enigma. This allows people to add comments, via chat, to an image in a slideviewer. These comments are cumulatively displayed as floating text above the corresponding image/slide. This gadget will be really useful for a number of purposes; not just for learning activities but perhaps also as a way of gathering feedback on learning activities in a session or sessions in a course. Many thanks CDB! (and Sendao and Ann!)

We then shot over to look at some great gadgets from long time SL educationalist, Eloise Pasteur. These included an evaluation tool and a 3D display of stock prices … for all those budding finance students!! Eloise unfortunately wasn’t able to make it as this Buzz session took place in the early hours in the UK, but do check these out on the NMC Labs sim or at any other number of Eloise’s store locations in the picks in her profile.

Giving as always, Lyr Lobo treated us to some great seating and setting arrangements for teaching and learning and also explained the slideviewer in some more detail. Go and check out Lyr’s gazebo, lounge seating and pillows (and her slideviewer) to be found inside a brown, rope-tied bag of gifts in the southern central area of NMC Labs. And don’t forget other free educational tools that Lyr has gifted to the SL educational community at previous events, which are available on the nearby NMC Conference Center sim. We followed Lyr’s settings and tools with a quick trip skywards for a tour of Stephane Zugwang’s Virtual Reality Room with CDB!

Finally, Ann Enigma showcased some of her latest tools from her and her students including the People Sorter (great for getting students into groups on the fly), Inspiro-Sphere (providing an inspiration for the day!), a tool that interfaces with the web to give the current weather for any location around the globe, and another web interface tool for searching Yahoo! News stories! Ann also put up a web link to her web-based LL script auto-production tool, Script Me! - incredibly useful to students and teachers alike. She ended by creating anticipation for the soon to be released version 2 of her great Info-Fez tool - and if you don’t know about this, then go and visit Ann’s Casablanca sim and her students’ work with Virtual Morocco!

“Show us your Gadgets” was a really popular session and we didn’t have time to cover all of them including Graham Mills’ StoryMachine, which was a real pity. So with calls for having this as a Teachers Buzz regular, look out for a future installment …. soon!

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Story filed under: Resources & Information, Teacher's Buzz, Teaching and Learning
Tags: learningtools, SLgadgets, teachersbuzz, teachingtools
See all stories by Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes)