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Today the students in the Science class at HSGC went on a virtual field trip. We 'went' to a vitual aquaculture water treatment plant that had been moved to the teen grid temporarily.
Zev Paiss was our tour guide, and he showed us all the stages the water goes through before being used again. In the first stage the 'waste' water is kept in a large tank full of plants and fountains under a greenhouse (which looked very pretty). The plants used the waste products in the water to grow, feeding on the nutrients.
The plants were then harvested and put into a huge tank and converted into gas that can be used for power or cooking. The water, meantime, was filtered through more plants and sand before being safe to pipe into the ocean.
It was a fascinating look at a process I really knew nothing about. It is a shame that more places aren't using this environmentally friendly way of cleaning water.
It was a fantastic 'build' too. None of the students questioned anything about the 'virtual' nature of the event. When asked "what type of building are we in?" they all pitched in with variations of "greenhouse" answers. They asked some great questions too, and gave enthusiastic responses when Zev asked them a question.
A real success in a virtual world :-)
This morning we got up REALLY early and got the 7am train. The reason for the silly early start (for a holiday!) was that we were going to school. This wasn't because I was missing being at school or because we thought Louis needed a head start in his education. We were actually going to visit the Science class I had been working with in Second Life.
Beth, who has been developing the science course material, visited the class today as well. She lives a hundred miles away but this was her first time visiting the class too.
The class went well. Today they were learning about coal mines. They were finding it difficult to navigate through the coal mine as it was small, crowded and also a 'phantom' object (they could walk through the walls) so combined with the lag meant they kept popping out the sides.
The detail was amazing though. At the entrance to the cave was a canary in a cave, while inside the cave was a dead canary in a cage! There was a miner 'chatbot' to question about how horrible it was cavemining. There was a shiny stream running past the mine that turned a bit gunky as it flowed past the cave. There were fish swimming around (actually moving) in the upstream water, although they looked a bit floaty and dead after the polluted water from the mine had been added.
The students job today was to look around and write down observations. They also had to interview the chatbots in and around the mine (coalminer, researcher, etc) and think about how much of what they are told is scientific 'fact'.
The students were a bit confused at me being in the room but were very friendly when I went round and helped them. It is so much easier being able to help kids in person than stand around in the virtual world and ocassionally shout "anyone need help?"
It was interesting at one point one of the kids told me he liked Sean's shiny trainers, pointing to Sean sitting at the back of the room. Sean doesn't have shiny 'bling' shoes in real life, he was logged into SL. The class has never met him before, yet this student was quite happy that this new person in SL was also the new person in RL.
Afterwards Tracy Rebe, the class teacher and Vice Principal, gave us a tour of the school. The school used to be Prospect Heights High School, a school with over 2000 students and a bad reputation. The school was split into four separate schools four years ago: HSGC, a international school with mainly ESL students, a school specialising in Science, and a fourth one that specialises in the music and theatre. The students don't mix and are not allowed in the other schools' corridors. There is also very little interaction between the schools staff.
The four schools are seperately about the same size as my school, yet the differences were incredible. Apart from the computers bought by Global Kids for the science SL class, there are a handful of computers around in various states. Similar to my students in Edinburgh, many of them don't have access to computers at home, yet at HSGC it isn't a taught subject. This has affected our science class in unexpected ways. At one point we asked them to email information to their teacher, yet many of them were unsure how to send an email. This is also a cultural issue - kids in the USA and the UK don't use email, they instant message (IM).
Funding for schools seems very unequal and dependent on how much tax people pay in the school district area. A rich area of New York state will have schools with computers and textbooks, while other schools in other areas struggle. Even comparing the four schools in the same building they seem to all be getting funding from different sources. HSGC gets some funding through Global Kids. I was very confused when I was first told that GK "had a school" but it makes more sense now.
The school is doing fantastic work though. Tracy spoke with pride about the students' work and huge change in attitude and behaviour since the old large school closed four years ago. The students are also getting fantastic opportunities that they wouldn't normally have, to travel and meet people. Academically results are much better, and this year will be the first year of students graduating from the High School for Global Citizenship. Congratulations to them all!
Today was our last class (awwww!). We have really enjoyed teaching the classes, and it's looked like everyone has enjoyed them. As well as the four people we were teaching, I think another half dozen people dropped in to see what was happening and now have avatars!
We started today with a bit of retail therapy and a trip to GuRLywood - the biggest and best hair shop in Second Life! :-)
Unfortunately the grid started to get a bit iffy so we went to Torley Linden's youtube site and all watched the video on creating your own SL animations. We then attempted to make our own animation, but the version of Qavimator for the Mac is buggy.
We switched to the FreeSound site instead and showed how to download short sound clips and import them into SL. We then made a giant piano with five keys each which all made strange noises. Mine had a trumpet fanfare, a meow, a laugh, a comedy toot toot horn, and an old-fashioned ringing phone.
We had a quick look at editing the land terrain, then Dan and Josephine arrived and we turned to testing streaming and setting up blogging.
We were joined by others at lunchtime, Sheri, Ranney (songwriter and comedien), DJ (the hiphop teacher), as well as a vast quantity of food. We then spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the summer program.
Afterwards we helped tidy up, including opening up all the sealed packaging on the headsets, mice and mousemats for the program. We then headed to the Jerk Hut for some jamaican food with Dan and Josephine before they headed off to the airport.
We've had a fantastic time teaching this class. I'm really going to miss everyone we've been working with, although I'm sure we'll still meet them online in SL! I'm looking forward to keeping an eye on the Kidz Connect island and seeing what they get up to with the kids there this summer.
Dan and Josephine were along this evening, but they'd had a long couple of days of meetings. Rachel wasn't along as she was graduating, and Sheri was back having been off since the start of last week. We also had a couple of staff along who would be helping with the program. They worked through induction island.
Crystal and Leslie played with making sculpted prims using Plopp SL. Crystal then did some shopping and Leslie worked on setting up the Kidz Connect blog. Sheri tried doing some building and textures.
On Tuesday we had asked everyone to come to class on Wednesday with a question or something they weren't sure about and want to cover more.
After writing a list we played a warmup game to practise camera controls, finding a hidden prim then IMing me after seeing the colour on the opposite side of the prim.
We looked at putting photos and links into notecards. We talked about ways to promote events in the teen grid and giving gifts and prizes to other avatars.
During the class Wendy dropped in to say Hi. She brought us a cassette tape of white noise that she made and used to sell to parents of babies with colic. We tried it out as Louis was lying about playing on the floor. It was kinda surreal teaching while there was the sound of a tumble dryer in the background!
For the last section of the class we looked at sculpted prims (or sculptees) using the fruit textures provided free in SL. Leslie made a very funky spinning apple with a picture of her avatar on it.
Start of the second week and we're doing well. We've still got lots of tasks and games we can do, but we're ahead of where we thought we'd be.
Today we started scripting. We now know how to make a prim look pretty but now we'll look at how to make it d things. We first looked at how to make a prim 'say' something (how to put text on the screen), so we made pet rocks that said "Rock on", "I'm a little rough around the edges" and "I want to be a shiny, spining rock"
We then looked at playing sounds when you click the pet rocks. We were using the sounds already in SL so there were lots of whistle, kiss and 'hey' noises round the room.
We headed to Yadni's freebie yard to get a collection of free sounds as well as the many other free delights at Yadni's. I also set up a Freesounds account the group can use to import creative commons sound clips into SL.
Our last task of the day was to get an object spinning using a rotate script from the Scripting Help wiki. Soon we had multicoloured cubes and glowing flexi-prim blobs spinning around. Josephine and Dan logged on and said hi as we were finishing up, which was cool. They'll be joining us for the last couple of sessions this week.
Today we had a full day session so we started looking at building. First of all we 'rezzed' a cube and looked at moving, rotating and resizing. We tried different shapes and changing the colour and texture, hollow and path cut before our first challenge of the day: make a chair. It was great that no-one went for a conventional chair, instead we got space sofas and beanbags.
We then looked at flexi-prims, glow and light, twist and taper, then tried another challenge - making a hat.
At lunchtime we headed for some Caribbean food at the Jerk Hut where we met up with Ilene and Joe, a couple of Second Lifers from the University of South Florida in Tampa. It was great for the teachers who are fairly new to SL to meet people who have been using SL in education for a while.
After lunch we looked at repeat rates on textures using a brick wall as an example. We then set our final challenge of the day - to make a learning space. We asked them to think beyond a classroom with cairs facing a blackboard and, after discussions about giant boomboxes, there was a plan to make a giant body. We set up three platforms and then the head, torso and legs were created, all facing a different way!