NMC Campus Observer

Washoe County Schools Professional Development in SL

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Dec 14, 2009 11:42am

Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada (an NMC member organization) hosted their first e-Learning teacher professional development conference this fall. Volunteer instructors hosted 35 workshops such as designing professional web sites, teachers and Twitter, cell phones as tools, Facebook, getting Jingy with it, flip video, Second Life, podcasts, iTunes, YouTube into the classroom, etc.

The conference, called CHOICES, opened September 29th and closed December 2nd. Classes were online or hybrid and participants designed their own learning experience. Conference sessions are available as a PDF from the web site.

One of the sessions which was offered (once a week, for four weeks), was Second Life. The first session was face to face and the other three were held in-world. The purpose of the class was to assist the participants through the SL learning curve and to have them explore educational sites in virtual world. As the small group “traveled” over the four week period we had them take photos of the places they had explored and post them to our district’s online learning site.

Tami Curley, one of the instructors, used animoto to create this video of their work which we showed at the conference closing session December 2nd:

Staff participating in this session loved it!

They were all troopers and hung in there from no hair to standing on furniture to not being able to find their way back home! And, as instructors we were happy to have had a very small class this first time around as facilitating learning in virtual world has a bit of a learning curve also!

Finally, if you think this format sounds like something Nick Noakes would pull together… you are correct. Tami and I attended his session at the last NMC summer conference, the work of Nick and his colleagues gave us this inspiration!

Story filed under: Campus Headlines

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)