Collection of tools for education

For a documented collection of educational tools in Second Life

In the field of the MUVEnation project, 18 SL residents have been exploring the grid and collecting, over two weeks, tools that can be used in educational settings. Our activity aimed to map the existing resources and to prepare a series of guided tours for other educators to discover these resources. Progressively the list of tools evolved, making difficult, or at least too complex, to map more than 90 tools in a single 3D object ça book, a poster, HUD or an automated guided tour in a bracelet).

Four SL residents, among the group of 18, had the idea to share the list in a public space like this. Their project is to complete the list, open an entry for each of these tools, describe them: illustration, description, functionalities and give also ideas for use in education. Once the commented collection of tools will be finished, they will make a paper based edition with ISSN and available under the Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-Non Commercial 3.0 license. All the contributors to the work will be recognised as authors.

The tools have been classified in 8 groups:

• Delivery of learning material
• Communication and interaction
• Cooperation
• Creation of content
• Individualisation of learning paths
• Assessment, feedback and tracking
• Self-organisation and group-organisation
• Reflection and meta cognition

We will start by the tools classified under *communication and interaction*. With the time passing, the other contributors will join and add their resources to the collection.

Description template

Each tool of the collection will be described using the following template: Name Context/Learning context (This includes a reference to the problem(s)the tool may solve) What it is? What does it do? (list of features) How it works? (user interaction) How it looks (photo of the tool)

Communication and interaction

Building dialogues

• Magic 8 Ball - Creator : Armandi Goodliff (in-world)
• Vocabulary U - Matic - Gavin Dudeney - Edunation

Organisation tools

• Visitor Counter/Distributor (Dedric Mauriac) at the ICT library

Giving information/announcements

• Whiteboard for communication
• Professional BlackBoard MessageBoard
• Chalk/Note Board
• Iternational Teaching, meeting, conference board
• Bulletin Board (Pixel Trix) at the ICT library
• GLP Bulletin Board (corkboard look) FREE
• Message board by Biran Gould at Terra Incognita, 350L$

Controlling chat range/chat enhancer/chat extender/chat relays

• Chat Range Alarm Scanner
• Free avatar scanner HUD FREE
• *AD* Relay Talk
• *AD* Relay Talk Ball
• Miss Gadgets Chatter!
• Virtual LoudspeakerSystem "Announciator"
• FarSpeech Personal Headset
• Total Chat System
• Chat Relay Box

Chat givers

• eacher's Aide, Classroom Edition

Attention getter

• Prim Chatter

Controlling status indicator/visual cues

• Advanced Online Indicator & Message ( onwer: Tmyclyck Dmytryk)
• En ligne

Controlling communication flow

• Meeting Control Soapbox (Eloise Pasteur) at the ICT Library
• Meeting Control Lights/Buttons (cheaper and more flexible than GK light bulbs and more flexible/features than the Soapbox)
• GK Light bulbs L$1000
• Question Mark (similar to Soapbox) L$300

Chat recorders

• Chat Logger: Script at the ICT Library
• Notetaker/Chat Recorder (Eloise Pasteur) at the ICT Library
• Temporal Gadgets Meeting Recorder

Organising discussions, debates, votes

• The Opinionator, Likert Scale - Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree Avatars walk to express position and the tool makes a pie chart score L$ 99
• Polarizer, Avatars walk to either agree or disagree Easily made with 3 prims and floating text
• Gettin a random word
• ABTech - Contest Board L$1950
• Secret MSGR - The Anonymous Communication Device L$ 450

After session evaluation tools

• Comment Dropbox (Dedric Mauriac) at the ICT Library
• Suggestion Dropbox ( Gavin Dudeney) at Edunation FREE

Meeting facilities/Meeting spaces

• Open Round Table This table is under the GNU open Licence, costsL$0 (is a set of scripts that enables your furniture to rez a new chair whenever anyone sits in an open chair)
• Decka's Decks Conference Facility Group meeting room with automated (flying) breakout rooms, teacher pager at Terra Incognitahttp://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/106/88/28 L$ 9000
• Poinky's Pods, Allows for speed networking (pairs of people holding a short 5 minute conversation then swapping partners automatically at Terra incognita resource centre
• NMC Mini Theatre, Small portable theatre and seating with screen at NMC campus

Professional places with meetings, events and workshops facilities for small and large groups interaction

• Alpine Executive Center, 3-D tools for business meetings developed for use in Second Life?
• Hyperstring.net Island,
• Liventura Island,
• OnlineMeetingRooms.com,
• Teamwork Dynamics Leadership Center,
• TechTalk@SL,
• SL Educational Round Table - Every Tuesday 2.30pm PST
• Edunation II - ' A coffee with'. Sundays (until June 2008)
• Cafe 101 - Fridays (upstairs: free tools)

Contributors

The main contributors to this work are, for the time being, SL residents:

• Wonderalica Alturas
• StevenW Bohm
• Daffodil Fargis
• Paz Lorenz
• Viki Silvansky