Journal Blog 7

Teachers can use virtual environments to educate students.  Here are a few such virtual worlds that can be effectively worked into the curriculum of a class..

1.     1.  Second Life is a virtual environment that was created and accessible through the Internet.  Users create avatars and can interact with others, explore, and socialize.  A teacher could use the Second life Virtual environment to have students visit virtual campuses and take virtual field trips.  More than 700 educational institutions have set up campuses in second life for use as educational tools.  The students can participate in distance learning and socialize with students of other schools or cultures.

http://secondlife.com/whatis/?sourceid=0410-sergoog-slSecondLife-wisl&gclid=CK-l3f-Pg6UCFSMd5wodmlcMNw

2.     2.  Augmented reality simulation is designed to engage people with real life experiences.  Using handheld computers, information is supplied to the participants. In one game setting, the users had to discover the source of a toxic spill using the handhelds and interviewing virtual witnesses.  This would be a good tool to use within a school to get the students involved in discovering something.  They would have to investigate and come to conclusions of their own using the information provided.

http://education.mit.edu/projects/mitar-games

3.     3.  Epistemic Games are games that are designed to get people to learn to think in innovative ways.  I would use these games within my classroom to get the children involved and to think “outside the box” to learn different ways to approach a problem.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/

4.     4.  Quest Atlantis could be used in my classroom by having the students create their personae and going on the virtual quests that are educational activities. Completing Quests requires that members participate in real-world, socially and academically meaningful activities, such as conducting environmental studies, researching other cultures, calculating frequency distributions, analyzing newspaper articles, interviewing community members, and developing action plans.  The concept is modeled after an online role playing game.

http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/start/index.html

5.     5.  The River City Project is a multi-user virtual environment for learning scientific inquiry.  The students will use their knowledge of today and travel back in time in a virtual environment to try and solve problems from that time.  The world is based on authentic sociological, and geographical conditions of the time, the students’ work together in research teams to investigate the reason for a town’s illness.

http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html