 Hi, this is Scott Merrick on my back porch and I just wanted to thank K-12 online conference for inviting me to participate in this way. I just wanted to slap my mug at the start of this video so you'll know who's yammering at you for the next slightly less than 20 minutes. I hope you enjoy what follows and I hope that it's useful to you and I hope that you will check back at the website and explore more deeply as your time will allow. Thanks for stopping in. Toodles. Howdy, this is Scott Merrick in Nashville, Tennessee at MNPS Virtual School. I am a virtual learning specialist here. I am a professional development chair of ISTI's SIGOL for online learning and I am an emeritus at Lowly High Grand Puba and co-founder of SIGVE, the Virtual Environments Special Interest Group for ISTI. I'd just like to join you today and share a little bit for K-12 online conference. I'm going to keep this under 20 minutes as directed by the administrators of the conference and I hope that you'll find it valuable. I recently rediscovered Wallwisher so I'm going to use that to drive this presentation and I hope that you will take the time later on at your own time to explore the resources I'm going to highlight here more fully. To start out with the most important resource that you'll be able to access henceforth will be the ISTI SIGVE wiki and let's just click on this one to view it. But you can see there's a picture of our Second Life Headquarters building, all of our social networks and video network there. On the front page of the wiki as well is a video I highly encourage you to go check out on your own and watch the whole hour, hour 20 minutes or so of the Connected Educators Month sort of tour of Virtual Environments that our group did for that event. One of the things I'd like to highlight for you right here is slanguages and it's an annual online conference I just finished up. There's six year which we'll get to but let's take a quick look at this video. And welcome everybody to today's Sunday the 18th of September. It's the third day of the slanguages 2011 conference and I'm very very pleased. So Professor Merman who is Mike's MEK, K-M-C-K-A-E-Y is the founder and creator of Cyprus Chat. And he is a young professor of English at the Mukogawa Women's University near Osaka, Japan. And he holds a master degree in education and technology. And his personal research or his research is in ways to making language learning go beyond mere school, well go beyond school and to be more accessible, more rewarding and particularly obviously a gaming environment that he's been developing. Cyprus Chat is one of the sims that whenever we get inquiries from language learners such as those who want to learn English, we are sending to because it's at the moment the only sim that is entirely dedicated to English language learning activities and which is free of charge. There's of course language lab but with language lab you have to pay a monthly bonus. And for some Chinese and like from third world countries it's almost unaffordable really. So what we do is we send them to Cyprus Chat and we hear fantastic stories and one of which was very touching to me was the story of Kata Karisma who is from Romania who learned his English at Cyprus Chat and has become a very fervent member of your community even trying to conduct some language learning activities himself because he loves Cyprus Chat. He taught us last time through your sim we were so impressed by the beautiful corners where you can have reading activities, learning activities. And we congratulate you professor for doing this yes in second life. We're looking forward to your presentation and you have if that's at all possible something like 20 minutes. I'm sorry what is starting late. And if you could then also do 10 minutes of question and answer so that we could perhaps wrap up by the full hour. Thank you very much and over to you professor. Well I'd like to thank you very much for organizing the CESA languages. I was sad to hear that last year it might have gone away but you've stepped up and kept it going. We need conferences like this because if we don't we're not able to gather, record, write, publish about what's going on in second life in virtual world. Cool so we'll stop right there. I wanted Mike to have a word at any rate. This is a 38 minute video and I again encourage you to please go back on your own time and watch the whole thing because you'll learn a whole lot about how the learning of languages can be enhanced by 3D virtual environment participation. That sort of sense of place at a distance is a fantastic, fantastic thing. Let's move on here. I'm looking at Chris Didi. I was lucky enough at the online learning symposium at the end of ISTI this past summer to spend a day. And one of the keynotes was Chris Didi who's a pioneer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I like to think of the CIGV virtual environment playgrounds at ISTI as a house of mirrors and he's done that in another way. With his eco move and eco mobile and he presented about it at our September speaker session in second life. We hold these every third Tuesday and Chris Didi came in to kick off our 2012-13 series. My friend Andy Wheelock hosts these and I helped co-host this one with Dr. Didi because I'm such a huge fan of his. But during it he explains how this whole thing works with a virtual environment that represents an ecological environment and a build back out into the ecological environment upon which the virtual world was built and embedding augmented reality objects inside this real life pond environment so that kids can get tasks and learn and create their own learning there. Again this is available at the WallWisher page and that's about an hour or so video and I encourage you to watch that. And he really feels that perhaps they're on the track of having some authentic assessment that isn't filling in little round dots with wooden graphite pencils. So check that out please. They have made this platform available for educators to download and run locally at their own schools and on their own servers. It's built with a game-based engine called Unity and it's quite good. Let's move on to Sasha Barab. I just clicked on his WallWisher object. He is the creator of Quest Atlantis and I had my kids in Quest Atlantis for two years, my fourth creators. For us that traditional curriculum really is missing and a lot of the way schools are arranged with mathematics for 45 minutes and the reasons why we do mathematics well that's somewhere out in the world that's not here but you're going to use it later on so you really should know it. With a game we can actually bring those worlds into the classroom and make those available to kids so a kid can travel to Tanzania or into a van Gogh painting within that 40 minutes that they have to do science or to do art. Well we're trying to rebuild the arch that evil people knock down and we're trying to help basically help the people of Quest Atlantis. There's this council and they can't do it alone so you have to try to help them. Yes, they're quite the dominant form of entertainment but do I really want the storytellers that are educating my children to be Sony, Blizzard, you know, electronic arts. I think there are a lot of wonderful games out there that have really good messages but I think that we as educators need to enter that market and start to develop compelling stories that kids will want to adopt in addition to those commercial ones. So I'd also suggest that you go and take a good look at the results from Googling Sasha Barab publications and I'll type that in my little notepad document so that you can see how to spell his name. Quite, quite, actually you can see how to spell his name from inside the wallwisher but there you go. There's your Google search term. He's got some really in-depth, nuanced and highly informed perceptions about game-based learning which after all is a lot of what we're about when we're talking virtual worlds. Certainly in Quest Atlantis which is a complicated set of quests that's very socially motivated and centered around social responsibility which I think makes it unique and certainly was wonderful for my fourth graders. Speaking of my fourth graders, I had them actually use a wallwisher wall which I included in this little session because I think it's cute. It's not only cute but it's also a way of using this unique kind of little post-it-note platform to solicit responses for your activities and alternative assessments. So as you can see I asked them a few questions at the top and they entered post-it notes down beneath them. It was a fun activity and it's something that you can replicate really easily in your own classrooms. You can see also that Lucy was extraordinarily verbal during this exercise. Lucy was actually a child who was not very outspoken in the class but she took to this sort of sharing like a duck to water I should say. I told you that we get back to languages this year and it was the sixth year of the event and I entered this top right wallwisher object is the web page for Avalon which was the organizing organization, Avalon Learning of Languages 2012. This was a three-day conference completely online with a large audience of attendees from all over the world. Another thing that these virtual worlds can do is extend your classroom into the global stage so that you can communicate with people and work with people and collaborate with people who are miles and miles and miles away. This is a really good page to revisit as well after this presentation. It does have a whole section there on Machinima and for those of you who may not be familiar with the term Machinima is a movie filmed inside a virtual world or gaming platform. ISTI has a great Machinima conference every year via SIGVE at ISTI and ISTI's annual conference. So the programs page you can see not only the program for the three-day event but how they use Adobe Connect to record the sessions so that you can actually go and click on one of these and view it as if you were present in real time. These online platforms like Adobe Connect and Blackboard Collaborate with IQ those sorts of learning management systems or delivery systems I should say are great for archiving things. And I told you we get back to ISTI SIGVE as well. We've been working together as a sort of a tribal community within ISTI working by our own rules which are largely non-rules to celebrate our community and our mutual interest in using virtual worlds largely as professional development. But I'm just sort of clicking around on the website here and you can see that Maggie Moratz got this beautiful video on exploring identity inside Second Life back when the teen grid was available in Second Life. But now anymore you've got Open Simulator and Kitely and many many other platforms where you can have these kinds of experiences to share with your students. Maggie is also the founder, it's Peggy Sheehy. Maggie Moratz is her Second Life name but Peggy is the founder of Wow and Schools and just googled that one too because World of Warcraft and Schools has proven very successful for her challenge kids and her middle school in New York. So I'm just kind of clicking around here and what I'd like to do is share my About Me page so that you can go in and connect and continue the conversation. If you have any questions I'd really really like you to email me at scottatscottmeric.net and I'm typing that out. It's really spelled like it sounds but you may have some questions. Capitals are not necessary of course. If you really want to connect, my About Me page is on this Wallwisher and it's got pretty much everything I do online which is kind of sort of lots of stuff. You can have your own About Me page for free. But I find that a really good platform. I've actually printed cards with a QR code that leads people to this page because it's pretty much got everything. I want to thank you for joining me today. I may add on a little bit more. I had intended to include a little tour of Kitely and it looks like I'm sneaking up on 15 minutes so I might be able to give you two or three more which would give you a little bit about Kitely because I'm very excited about that open simulator platform and I want to show you what I'm doing in order to set up to use it for my kids. So, oh, I already filmed that. So here it comes. Kitely is just Kitely.com and if you go to Kitely.com it's very intuitive and very easy to set up an account and to get yourself an avatar and avatar name. We'll assume that you've downloaded a Virtual Worlds client which could be the second live client. I'm sort of off of that these days because it's been crashy on my computer and so I've migrated my usage over pretty much over to Firestorm which is from Phoenix. If you just Google Phoenix Firestorm Download you'll be able to get that client and if you have several Virtual Worlds clients like Firestorm, Phoenix, oh, different ones, the second live client, you'll get the option the first time you fire up a Kitely world you'll get the option to identify one that you'd like to use for Kitely and I have linked my Firestorm to that. I've been babbling relatively incoherently as we get to my avatar inside the Virtual School that I'm building out with a sandbox where you can go and practice your building skills or the students will be able to do that. And around the perimeter of the sandbox are sort of learning objects where they can go and we'll zoom in on one here. They can learn about all kinds of things about how to do things in second life with their avatar. I feel pretty certain that once a student has made it around this perimeter and has practiced these things and then gets together with others which is really what this is all about, isn't it? That the student will have all the requisite skills to be able to proceed inside the Virtual World. Thanks again everybody and we'll see you around.