 Hello everyone and welcome to the 10 a.m. session in the research and education practice. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to at OpenSim CC with the hashtag OSCC 14. This hour we are happy to introduce a terrific panel session called effectively engaging and teaching grade schoolers in self-hosted virtual worlds. Our panelists today are Andrea Benassi researcher and developer at Indire the Italian National Institute for Educational Research and Innovation located in Florence. Http backslash backslash www.indire.it. He is currently project coordinator of Edmondo national pedagogical coordinator of the Pan-European ITEC project designing the future classroom. Annalisa Baniello. Ms. Baniello is a high school natural science teacher and a Ph.D. candidate in teaching earth science at University of Camarino Unicam with a thesis on the use of virtual worlds in geoscience education geological hazards. She has master's degrees in e-learning at the University of Florence Italy and in metacognitive learning at IUL Italian University online. David Deeds. David Deeds switched from corporate geek to Ed Tech evangelist back in 2001 and has worked in both international higher ed and K through 12 educate institutions since. David started using virtual worlds in education as of 2006. He is now the technology integration coach for the American School of Guatemala. Carolyn Lowe. Carolyn is an associate professor of science education at Northern Michigan University where she teaches life science for future teachers undergraduate and graduate courses in teaching science and basic biology. She lives in the woods in the beautiful upper peninsula of Michigan. Carolyn previously operated Biome and Biome 2 in Second Life as Chloe Greenwood and now has two complete grids Biome and Biome for Kids as part of the Virtual Islands for Better Education Vibe Collaborative. Amy P. Leinen. Amy is a K through 12 teacher in a small rural school in the upper peninsula of Michigan and is conducting research on the use of virtual worlds to teach science in a K through 12 setting. Amy will not be joining us today and we hope she feels healthier soon. Andrew Wheelock. Andrew Wheelock, Spiff Whitfield, is a technology integrator at Erie One Bossies recently. He was awarded the Outstanding New York State Technology Leader Award and previously served as the chairperson of ISTI's SIGV, now VEN group from 2011 to 2013. Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Grand Island New York and assisted with the development of the Air of the King virtual world project. She also writes an awesome ed tech blog titled yoursmarticals.blogspot.com. As research and education track leader I put out the call for this panel to discuss when the distinguishing features of open sim versus Second Life, the ability to run your own worlds. This contrasts historically with the land rental model. This has unique applications in education where privacy and security are expected and the law in the education space. These panelists run or manage a grid whose specific use is for students and educators. Welcome all. Let's begin the session by hearing a short introduction from each grid and then we will go to the prepared questions. One grid will take the lead on each prepared question and I will field questions from local chat and insert as appropriate into the voice stream. We will open the floor to questions at the end. We start with the avatar closest to me, Andrea, and go in seating order to the end of the couches. And now to our first speaker, Andrea. Hi all. I'm Andrea Benassi from Indirae and here is some stats about Edmondo, the Italian virtual world for schools by Indirae. So we started in 2009 open to public in 2012. We are dealing with virtual worlds from 2006 when we entered second life. But we thought that second life and general purpose grids had some critical issues for an educational purpose. So we started trying finding another solution and we found open simulator that in 2009 was very, very at a very early stage. So we worked hard to here. We work hard to find a good balance for teachers. And this is what Edmondo is starting to do from 2012. Well, what are the critical issues for schools? We recognize five issues. And the first is safety. You know, schools have to be sure that students are in a safe environment, no? And the second is identity. In a learning management system is very important to know who the users are. The third is costs. You know, second life as a cost for virtual space, costs, hidden costs and the object that students could want to buy, you know? And the fourth is LMS facilities. Well, web-based learning management systems have management option for teachers and so on. And often virtual worlds lack this kind of features. And the fifth one is a steep learning curve. Let's face it, virtual worlds are difficult to learn. And many, many people, many teachers, are finding difficulties in doing that. So these are the Edmondo main features about safety. Only teachers and students are enabled to enter Edmondo for educational purposes. Identity. Now, second life, people use their real name and their real identity. And three, no costs for teachers or school. No way for students to spend money in words. And class management options. We are working hard on it. The teacher will soon, very soon, directly subscribe and manage their minor students account. And the last one, in-word training, a professional development for teachers by a national institute for educational development. So these are the main features about Edmondo. And maybe we will come back to them later. Okay, Stephen. And now Lisa will give us a brief description of her grid. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. And I am Annalisa Buñello. And I spoke yesterday about Unicamert Island. The island is an open theme of the University of Camerino. And it is focused on geoscience and students with teachers work together in the virtual path on geoscience. This island is focused to improve motivation, creativity, collaboration, science education, and to improve scientific skills. And in Unicamert Islands, we have only science teachers and students. And this is a collaborative community to science teacher. I am only a science teacher that collaborate in Edmondo. And Edmondo, so I will talk about Edmondo as a teacher, as a science teacher. And in Edmondo, Edmondo is a project of Vindire. In Edmondo, there is a lot of teachers of different topics, math, chemistry, foreign language, science, these teachers sharing experience. This is very important for every teacher in Italy. In this world, there are tutors with the teachers, so only teachers isn't alone in the world. And there is a promotion in Edmondo, promote collaboration and cooperation with teachers, promote project in the schools and innovation in the Italian, in the Italian schools. And this is very important for the Italian school. But another important focus of a feature of Edmondo is the certification, certification by Indire. This is a great value for teachers. This is a certificate, this activity is a certification of experience in virtual words for every teacher. In this slide, I show you some projects of Edmondo. For example, there is the fairy tale of Pinocchio, the adventure of Pinocchio, Antarctica, a good beautiful project on Antarctica of Annie Mazzocco, the fairy tale of Pinocchio by Simone Tanelli and Monica Boccoli, and other projects. For example, a project on Middle Age, on math, and there is a project on Science Island on my project on Science Island. And in Edmondo, there is a sharing of experience of different topics. And this is very important for me and for other teachers. I have finished and I go talk to Caroline. You're hearing me okay? Caroline Lau. And I am from in Northern Michigan University and Amy P. Linen suddenly became ill yesterday afternoon. And I told her I would excuse her and hope she feels better very soon. Okay, we do not live on the Mitten in Michigan. We live way up here on Lake Superior. They call us Ubers for UP. And we I teach at Northern Michigan University. And Amy is one of my grad students and also a middle school teacher in a small rural school. And basically out in the woods. Bio for Kids is based around Earth System Science, which is looking at studying science not from chemistry, physics, and that way, but looking at it through spheres that interact. So we have islands for the hydrosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere. And here I have two of the islands, geosphere and atmosphere. And then for the kids version, we have two places. One of them is called Seaborgium. And I have some students, some children who are helping me build that it's more of a collection place, party place, just get together. And also I just lost my slide. Imagine area and we had to build that because they were building everywhere. And so we had to make a place where they could build. It's for K 12 children. And we're using that for schools. Home school children or just kids who want to join and play at home. I have the security right now. So I vet everybody and we have it where they can get on the island. So we could have people get an account to get there, but they can't get off of the one island to where the education areas are without my permission, me inviting them to a group. All the avatars are little animals. That was first of all decided by the kids. That's what they wanted to do. And then it dawned on us. We don't have problems with body types with in, you know, identity, human identity, gender issues. So and they like it. So I've stuck with that. I'm not the best avatar builder, but I have been building avatars and they do seem to work. We also allow practicing and pre service teachers there. And again, I do check those out. And those are the only adults that we do allow into biome for kids. We do have biome, which is has no age limit, young or old, and children 14 and up may prefer that because they can hypergrade to the other vibe islands, which they cannot do from biome for kids. So they can go to genome and the different areas. But that would be up to the school, the teacher and what have you. So I'm going to save that slide for answering my questions and I will pass it now on to David. Well, when it's time is a todos good afternoon, everybody. In real life, I'm David deeds in second life and other virtual worlds. I'm D David's. Okay, so it's not much of a secret identity, but it seems to work. I'm very honored to be part of this panel today. This is my two minutes feel. I was an attendee at last year's open simulator community conference. I was amazed and I realized that I just had to be a part of it as a presenter this year. As Steven mentioned, I started using virtual worlds in 2006, specifically second life when I was working at a university in South Korea. I started using open simulator in 2009. When I switched to K12 schools, of course, as you know, back then, second life was only available to people who were 18 or older. I'm at my fourth K12 school. Now I've worked in Georgia, China, Mexico, and of course, in Guatemala. I've hosted my own grid. I had to in China because of internet problems. We had to use a local in it worked out quite well, learned quite a bit about open simulator and grid management in general in the process. But I've mainly used third parties. We started with reaction grid. Dreamland Metaverse is what we've been using over the past few years. I've got a Kitely grid now. And we're also part of Steven's group and Carolyn's group, the virtual islands for better education. We're off to kind of a slow start this year because of firewall problems that quite frankly have just not been a very high priority yet. But we'll get those straightened out. As I mentioned, mainly Dreamland Metaverse over the past few years, especially in Mexico, what I like about this is that you manage your grid via a web interface. And so I have complete control over a lot of things, especially over who gets in. And as I'm sure this will come up during this panel discussion, this is very important when you're dealing with nervous parents and administrators regarding living little munchkins into virtual worlds. Now, as far as getting other educators interested in doing virtual worlds teaching, I would suggest among other things that you start with a concrete example. This is one that we did in China. We had an art teacher who was having kids build an adobe village. It was out of paper mache, it kept falling apart. Had a building inside it, they wanted to build all the furniture and other things inside the adobe village as well, because they had been studying about this in their history class. And so we started building it in open simulator. And as you can see from the slide, it was really fantastic. You can't see in the slide what's inside, but we actually had all the furnishings, fireplaces. It was really great. If you can start with a concrete example where you are helping another teacher accomplish something. That is one of the things that I would suggest as far as getting other people started with virtual worlds. That's all I have right now. So I will pass it on to Spiff Whitfield. Thanks, David. And thanks, everyone. It's great to be here. My name is Andy Wheelock in real world, Spiff Whitfield Second Life. And I'm a technology integrator in Western New York, and we serve over 100 different school districts. With my dealings with Second Life, I started, I guess founded a group called the virtual pioneers in Second Life. And anyone's welcome to join us every Sunday evening from 5pm Second Lifetime. And through that group, I really discovered the power of virtual environments and especially the power of teaching history and culture. I think virtual worlds have a really unique place in that possibilities. And I know just from being a 15 year elementary teacher, a lot of you know, one of the biggest comments I'd hear every year was whenever we talk about history, which was my favorite subject, the kids would always say, it's so boring. And that always bothered me to hear that. But and so when I tried to look at it from a student perspective, I could kind of see why it was is boring to them, you know, just textbooks and pictures while those all can be powerful in their way. Today's student really needs to be active. They need to be engaged in history. They need to really see through their own mind's eye what history is. Of course, books are a wonderful way to bring that across movies are also a great way. With virtual worlds, it really gave them a way to be to interact with history simulations. You know, yes, they're not going to be able to transport back to World War Two. But we could create a virtual, you know, simulation of the times of World War Two that they could interact with. I think that has such powerful learning connections that I had to explore it. I was fortunate enough that, you know, I talked to my work and they were willing to give me a server space for an open sim environment. So we downloaded the diva distro, you know, build and thanks to those people for putting that out there. And then we got a grant through New York Statements, New York State Department of Education called Technology and Learning Grant. And that allowed me to really spend more of my time. We would allow us to, again, server costs or your big issues and costs and having people maintain those costs. So through that grant, it really gave me the opportunity to be able to go out and do free professional development for teachers and also go to their schools. And what's been created is called the Islands of Enlightenment Projects. And you can see my little website. It's just islandsoe.weebly.com. We'll go to our site and give you information. So I guess it's just been, through those projects, we've come up with three different offerings for students. One is the Understanding the Holocaust Project, which is a recreation of the streets of Amsterdam where students can, it's kind of a companion piece to the diary of a young girl, Anne Frank. So kids can actually visualize some of that. And then our second opportunity was one with Mary, my colleague, to my avatars left. And that one is a virtue we did, the Air of the King Project, which was a medieval role playing. I'll let Mary talk about that. And then this year, we're really going to, we're working with the Darwin-Martin House in Buffalo, which is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. And because of the passion for building, we just discovered that this would be a logical extension for the year three of this project and allow students to learn about history, learn about architecture, learn about art, and then put those all together so that students and teachers could put together projects where they build and create and put that passion for building into learning and art and architecture. And also I'm part of ISTI and the Virtual Environments Network, so I hope if you're interested, you can join us there. Join us with virtual pioneers. And so glad to be here. Thanks. All right. Thank you. Everyone for the introductions to your grid. As a part of the panel, we will now move to the prepared questions. And the first question that we have up and the lead on the answer will be taken by Spiff and Mary is what makes an effective virtual world learning activity? And after they're done, other panelists may chime in and then we'll move on to the next question. Mary, I'll let you jump in there. Mary, you with us? Yes, I am. Thank you, Andy. Just to backtrack a little bit, I know you mentioned the Air of the King project and Frank project and the German Martin project and as a sixth grade teacher, it's been a very amazing experience seeing the engagement level that my 10 year olds have had. We were able to bring over 90 students into the grid last year with the Air of the King project. And I think what made it an effective virtual world learning activity was the fact that it was a gamified curriculum. We blended medieval learning medieval history with that gamification concept. So our students came into the virtual world and they had a task. They had a challenge, which was to determine who the heir to the throne was. Our little imaginary world was, it's called Stormfield and we proposed a problem to the students and whether or not they could figure out who the heir of the throne was going to be. Then through a series of quests and adventures and leveling up XP point, the kids went through the entire virtual world collecting all of this evidence. And that was a great way to keep them engaged, keep them focused, but also meeting the common core standards, which were definitely important for us to meet. So in the end, you know, I had 95 students that were engaged, motivated, learning, yet I also as an ELA teacher had met my standards, which were expected of me with writing pieces that were simply exemplary by these kids because they were so motivated and because they were so engaged. So I really do recommend and feel that the gamification concept is a beneficial one when working with virtual worlds. If I can just follow up with that. I think the other piece that Mary and I both discovered and it was a pleasant surprise is just the building and creative possibilities. When you can put students to work building something you can really pull a lot of different education out of them without them realizing. So any other panelists wish to make a comment? Well, I'd like to say that one of the reasons why I like Open Simulator so much is that it enables differentiation without having to make any conscious effort of doing it. In China, we had a very small school. There was no way we could separate students. So in one class we would have native kids who could barely string three words together. We had special needs. We had gifted kids all together in the same class. And so what I've done as far as making effective virtual world learning activities is to start with a skeleton lesson plan. Just enough structure to keep students focused on the objectives. But then to allow teams and individuals to interpret that assignment according to their own abilities and according to their own desires. And so they have the ability to get the kid. We had kids who were almost beginning programmers beginning professional programmers by the time they finished one of our classes. The fact that kids can do this without being fluent in English because you could switch the viewer to their own particular language also allows everyone to succeed on their own terms. Oh, very good example. All right. We will move on to the next question. Which is what makes young students excited to be in virtual worlds. And Carolyn and Elsie can you comment on that. Still trying to get Elsie into the call for some reason. It's not connecting there. So I'll start. First of all I want to make a comment. Andrea talked about the learning curve. Our experience is we don't have a learning curve with kids. The first time I tried to teach them some building skills, one of them said to me five minutes later. Well, if we make our water phantom, can we swim in our pool? And I realized I was wasting my time. So learning curve has been for the teachers, not for the curve, not for the kids. One of the things that we found is they actually like learning in the virtual world. They think it's exciting. They think it's fun. And so that's just something that is really interesting. These are a couple of the learning activities that we have. We're presenting this afternoon at 1.30. And so I didn't put a whole lot of the learning activities in here so that Elsie can talk some more about that. And here we have classrooms that we have. They really like the flying saucer classroom. It's very star tricky. And we have a steampunk submarine classroom, a treehouse classroom. And we also have one inside of the volcano. So they enjoy classroom meetings and doing presentations in the virtual world. And they love to build. They that's why I had to make a building island because they were building everywhere. And I wanted them to build some, you know, because I want them to help me build content. And part of their activities that they did, their learning activities, were to build content. They built creatures that were adapted for. They were built creatures that were adapted for their certain environment. And they just had so much fun. And at the time, these were fifth and sixth graders and their creatures were amazing. And they had to explain the adaptation and why that that worked. The buildings that you see here, some of them were built by a first grader and some by a eighth grader. So we have the whole range of builders. And they're very good, actually. And I I'm reading the chats is very interesting. So why what are they excited about everything? They really like they love it when my pre service teachers log in and they get to talk to them. They're all so excited to talk to somebody else talk to other kids. They like helping each other. They like building exploring just wandering around and they love flying pandas. Don't know, but they just think flying pandas are hilarious. So I'll turn this over. Oh, this is our webpage. First of all, if you go there, you can fill out a as an educator, you can fill out a request to join or you can email me for more information and you can have your children join us. That would be awesome to get some children from Italy meeting our kids from the UP. I can make them available. I'll mute for sake of time. We'll move on to the next question. And that is. What are the advantages? And how does one actively effectively manage an education specific grid? And this is to our Edmondo section. Okay, well, some some benefits are those in the background slide, but let's point about collaboration between different schools. For example, the last year for schools collaborated in Edmondo for about the rec rebuilding of Selinute, the archeological site of Selinute, not not as it is now, but as it was in the fort in 400 before Christ. So a class of topography went to Selinute in the archeological site and did the service. Another class of history of arts did a great job in did a great job in making research on scientific sources to reconstruct every aspect of Selinute in the 400 before Christ. Another class, another class did a great job in making the technical drawings. And another one, that's one rebuilt, virtually rebuilt the site of Selinute. So this is great because schools and classrooms of different distant schools can share virtual place, a laboratory online in which to collaborate, in which to create some shared shared things and environments. This is, I think, this is a great value in comparison with school grids, no, in which only the inside the schools, students can collaborate. And I think this is a great value in comparison with the general purpose large grids, because I think that the difference is that inside Edmondo, there is an institution that can coordinate educational projects between different schools. There's a third subject in Edmondo. One subject is the virtual world. Another subject are the students and teachers, the schools. And the third is a real institution that can manage the processes, just like in some learning management systems. So Edmondo, we are aiming to act in Edmondo, a learning management system, system open to all the Italian schools. And maybe not only the Italian schools, we are starting collaboration between three countries, Spain, Greece and Italy, about archaeological, virtual archaeology, in the same manner of the four Italian schools of the last year. So maybe the last year we have, we'll have a shared place between three different countries. Annalisa. Annalisa is a teacher in Edmondo and she can, she can take their sides about it. Yes, I think the same of Andrea, but I think that the same is for Onicam Earth Island. For Edmondo, there is a specific activity for teachers and students together and to, for a project, very important project for Italian school, for an innovative Italian school. And I think this is the very, very important phase, an innovation in the practice in the school and agreed on a virtual world dedicated to, for school, as a, as a, as a feature. And the idea, instead, the idea of Onicam Earth Island is what is the, the, the feature? Yes. A distance learning content on geoscience of university, geology division for the school, for teachers, for science teacher and for students with learning activity on geoscience. So every school can go into Onicam Earth Island and work in this virtual world, in this virtual part with inquiry-based science education activity. Okay, for me. Caroline? All right. I'm gonna, let's move on to the last question so David can talk a little bit, although we did mention it earlier, about how do you get other educators to engage in virtual worlds teaching? David? Yes, as I had mentioned before, for a specific teacher, it's good to have an example to be able to go to them and say, look, I've got an idea for a certain project. Schoolwide, I have found, as I find when I slide here, I have found that it's best if, for example, you have a higher goal, an overarching goal of cross-curricular or interdisciplinary instruction. I started off in an international baccalaureate school, an IB school, in which this is part of the actual design for the classes. Now I'm not in an IB school, however, we have started our STEM program, or now we're calling it STEAM, we've added arts. And of course, the idea is the ultimate elimination of subjects in general, but in order to have like a unit, a unit question. And everyone talks about this sort of thing, but nobody really knows how to do it. So you can bring up virtual worlds as the perfect complement to anything that your school is trying to do in this regard. The classic example is Earth Day, which we might try again at my current school coming up in April. Every subject now has an angle in order to address Earth Day. Science of course has plenty of things to do. Math can handle the calculations involved, art, and then of course all of this can be complemented by a virtual world, because kids have the ability to, for example, design gizmos for solving global warming and other kinds of problems. They don't actually have to work. Their imaginations can run wild and they can do whatever they want to. So as far as getting others to engage in a virtual world, kind of mode, start with the easiest self on an individual basis. Try the art teacher. Tell them that now kids can do their paintings or do their drawings. You can take a photograph of them and then put them up in an art gallery in Second Life or in Open Simulator and now thousands of people from all over the world can see it. Music, of course you know you can use a shout cast server and send your podcasts or send people's music productions and you can have concerts by kids. So after students start using it, it's usually word of mouth that will get other teachers curious. All you have to do is make one cell, really. Yes, that's right. Most people just don't get it. IT is one of the easiest subjects to start with, but you don't want to limit yourself to IT because otherwise all the other subjects are gonna say, well, all virtual worlds, yeah, that's great for the IT class, but not for art or for history. So start with an individual teacher, art or music as just after students start doing it, word of mouth is going to get other teachers curious and then conduct demos for teachers of the other subjects. And one of the most successful things that I've done over the past few years is to get a virtual field trip arranged. For example, at the school in Mexico, Max Chatmauer took our biology class on a tour of Genome Island and that sold the worlds to everybody at the entire school. And that's it. Okay, thank you, David. That is an excellent example, excellent strategy. For sake of time, we're gonna do one question from the audience that came in first because we only have about a minute left. And the question came from France Charming. As a content interactivity developer for virtual worlds, I'm curious what kind of problems you face creating content for your classes and how can developers help? Anybody want to take that one? Quickly? I can take it as an educator with a class of 65 students. It's time, time, time, time. There's just not enough time and hours in the day to do all the things that I want to do with the students and create all the things I'd like to create. So that's where developers would come in, I would say. I would like to see more open simulator specific Linton scripting language examples. When I start kids with programming and of course this is one of the wonderful things about virtual worlds is that kids can see an instant payoff to their programming. But we had a lot of trouble trying to convert scripts that were written specifically for second live to open simulator. If we could have specific scripts for open simulator, a library of different scripts they can choose from that would really be great. Any other commentary on that one? I think that the passion is the force for every teacher. And so every problem, every situation can be easy when there is a passion for innovation, for content in the virtual world. So the students, the same for the students. All right, well, we have hit our time. So I will close to first by thanking the panel speakers for a terrific presentation. And as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following the session at 11 a.m., we have a break in the schedule for lunch or dinner wherever you may be in the physical world. In addition, if you are a crowd funder at the exclusive access level or above, you are invited to a VIP Q&A session with today's keynote speaker in the staff zone auditorium. Finally, we'll return after lunch break for an hour of exploring the conference grid from 12 noon Pacific until 12.45. If you haven't yet had a chance to visit the expo regions or play the open MediQuest game, this will be your chance. We also encourage you to visit the story wheel exhibits in the Education 2 region to view a tool created in the 16th century called the books wheel, which can be thought of as a precursor of the modern website. Thank you again to our speakers and audience. We'll be back after lunch. Have a great break.