 Hello everyone and welcome to the 1.30 pm session in the research and education track. 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 atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC14. At this hour we are happy to introduce a terrific session called Virtual World Learning with Real Standards K-12 Standards-Based Learning in a Virtual World. We have two speakers today, Carolyn Lau. 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. Carolyn, a.k.a. Chloe Greenwood, has two complete grids, Biome and Biome for Kids, as part of the Virtual Islands for Better Education or Vibe Collaborative. Amy, P. Lyonan, Amy is also known as Elsie Occhello and she is a K-12 teacher in a small rural school in the upper peninsula of Michigan and she's conducting research on the use of virtual worlds to teach science in a K-12 setting. Welcome all and let's begin our session. Welcome. We've been working in the virtual world now for a few years and I was real exciting to be able to build the Biome for Kids virtual world. One of the things that we run into are when teachers, especially me, I work with a lot of teachers in professional development settings and they say, we can't take time to do virtual worlds because we have to teach standards and we have to teach the test. I'm sure you've all heard that before. And so we have a solution. Our solution is use the interactive environment of the virtual world to teach and assess the student's understanding of the standards. And I'm just going to give you some background. I'm Elsie. I'm just going to give you a little bit of background about my class at the time of the project I was doing. I had 13 fifth and sixth grade students at the time that were attending a rural school in the upper peninsula of Michigan. There are 53 students that were total students in the school. They were preschool through eighth grade and the students are taught in combined classrooms so my fifth and sixth grade students were taught in the same classroom. Getting students started in Biome. First, we had to get them screen names and passwords. Students chose their avatars. Chloe and I decided up front that they were going to be animals instead of humans because they are preteens. We avoided the whole human aspect of them and we just decided that they were going to be creatures instead. We decided that they could just try things out first. They learned how to fly and they were all over the place. They were actually playing hide and seek first so they were having lots of fun in it. Just got to discover at first. And if you could change the slide please. And then they learned how to teleport. They learned also how to offer teleports to others. They learned how to landmark places in the world. To chat not only with people who were nearby but to send messages with each other. And then they also learned how to build. And they learned how that building was just linking geometric shapes together. Their first assignment was to create a chair. And then they started building houses and pools. And the next few slides are just some images of some chairs that they created. And I believe there's a house in there as well. Okay, we're going to talk about the next generation science standards which are the newer version of the science standards. Based on some research done by the National Research Council and other groups. And being adopted right now by many of the states. So how can you do science and still address the science standards? This is an example of one of the science standards. Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well. Some survive less well. And some cannot survive at all. And I included the clarification statement there because that helps guide the curriculum. Again standards are not a curriculum. They don't tell how to teach it. They're just saying these are outcomes. This is what students should know. Now Amy's going to share with you a little bit about how we addressed this particular standard with her students. Amy? What we did do with species adaptation and survival. The students were given a scenario regarding creatures that needed to survive in a certain type of environment. And they were given certain parameters. They were given a cool dry environment and then a warm wet environment. And then using the information that the students had. The students had to create creatures that they thought would best survive in that environment. And then once they created those creatures the students went around and they presented that information. And they had to essentially create a case as to why those creatures would survive in that in those surroundings. And the next few slides are of the creatures that they did in fact create. Really enjoyed watching the students create these slides. I mean these creatures and then discussing why they were well adapted. Now remember these were fifth and sixth graders with about an hours worth of building training or less than that because training them was kind of a little waste of time. They trained themselves. Okay another problem that we run into that I run into is teachers and it's so unfortunate in many of the different school districts I hear we don't do science because we're only tested on language arts and mathematics. And in fact one of my granddaughters called me the other day and said yes I think next nine weeks we do STEM. I think that's science. So in her school they only do science for nine weeks. She is eight. So it's really important that we help people understand how to do science and English language arts and mathematics and use interesting curriculum designs like virtual worlds. So it's really nice for science in particular because the next generation science standards have put in there the common core connections kind of delaying a little so that the audio catches up with the slides. Okay this is a this slide shows the common core literacy that goes along with that unit that we just talked about and students can report on a topic. They can describe relationships, write opinion pieces and I see eight-bit talking about if we had the activities available and ready that's what we hope to do. We hope to build some activities and have one teacher build one activity that many others could use. So sharing activities is the way to go. Okay for the next slide we're going to talk about the molecules to organism structures one of the science standards and this is in the elementary age group and as students who demonstrate understanding can construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival growth behavior and reproduction and so examples of those could include thorn stems colored petals heart stomach and so on and Amy had a really good idea of how to do that with her classroom so Amy if you could go ahead and talk a little about what you did with this next activity. Okay so what my students did they had an animal classification assignment and Chloe did she had a coral reef that she created and the students first went into this virtual coral reef as a class and each student chose a coral reef animal to research and the students actually physically made drawings in the real world of their creatures and they took digital photographs of them and then they imported them into the virtual world and then they researched their creatures and then they actually they also imported presenters into the coral reef very similar to the one we're using now in this presentation so they had to learn about the texture and the HUD so they had to learn how to click through and to upload photos into virtual worlds which was quite cool so and once again they had to learn how to present information in chat form and it's really interesting when when students are presenting information in front of in front of a class when they're speaking as opposed to in front of a class when they're typing because when they're in front of a class when they're speaking they'll say uh um uh well uh that but when they're typing they're much more concise and they have to be much more to the point because they're typing and they have to do it well so they they were very much to the point and they actually became much better speakers because of it so it was quite cool and it did it um they they became very good at um uh learning how to resize and upload photos um they were working with PowerPoint they were working with um the presenters and they learned a lot about the animal classification which was quite cool I think one of the most fascinating things that Amy has found and I'm very interested in is how using this technology for her face-to-face class has changed the interactions within the classroom and how they're taking these skills not just skills like making pictures but also skills like um how they interact with each other how they write how they communicate and putting that into their to the rest of their um experiences yes absolutely absolutely one of the biggest yeah and yes so I think big one of the biggest things was socially how they interacted with each other because um there was um one one student in particular who um socially didn't interact with the other students very well but was um was very good with computers and because all of the other students wanted to do very well in this program they would ask the student for help and it helped it helped this student become much more popular in the class and much more socially capable than the than the student was before and that helped that helped a lot and also there were students that would not speak in class but would speak in this program which was very amazing and it was it was cool they would almost never speak in the class but then would speak to each other in here and so that was very very cool okay we have I've been putting up some pictures here of the different presentations that students were making and the pictures that they drew and you can see all their little avatars sitting there listening if you would to the presentation and they again they were presenting them in world so they weren't talking about it in the classroom they were actually presenting it in world and there always has to be some some panda that has to sit on the presenter but you know that's okay I want to talk briefly about another activity that they did um that I didn't have any pictures of but Eva Kamarowski from the UK helped design a an object that puts out bacteria and there's two different kinds there's resistant red bacteria and green bacteria and you click on it to kill it but it's a lot harder to kill the resistant bacteria of course they found that they could sit on the bacteria and when they somebody killed it they would fall to the ground I thought that was pretty clever that's basically what they figured out and like I said same with the presenter program once they figured out that they could sit inside like the powerpoint picture they thought that that was pretty cool and then once they realized they could sit on top of the the the bacteria they thought that that was pretty sweet too so yep exactly and I mean that's interacting with your content that's pretty cool I think the next slide um I just want to point out that at the time of this project there were um the national uh next generation science standards had not yet been adopted in fact Michigan is still kind of in limbo about that common core had not officially been adopted so when we started this um these things were not in place um they were at the time working with the Michigan grade level expectations for k8 education which is um more specific content than what the next generation science standards are and so the content we have here were matched with that but now that we have the national the next generation science standards we can um reach out to the rest of the country I understand 28 states have adopted them they're very um process oriented engineering and doing more things so um in that it's the content's not gone it's up to the teacher to teach the content to get you to the point where you can use it in the process um but now we can anything else that we devise we can add those components in we can tweak it or we can say this one fits very well but the idea is any future um projects that we do will match the uh the standards and so um we plan to provide any information for any um activities that we do devise and we hope that some of you all will come in and help us devise activities and what I really like is when I get kids and I have some of her students helping me um so we'll provide that to the teachers and I think eight bit was talking about that teachers need to know how to do it and need a product and we can do that um also my uh biome for kids is based upon earth system science so it's not just life science it's um hydrosphere atmosphere biosphere and geosphere so we're working on developing some other curriculum in the other sciences that would also match standards and um try to get some real interactive things not just um lecture um right now we have several things in the works um one is already there and it just needs the um worksheets put together this the uh activity sheets um the point centered quarter method of determining forest diversity a big olong word but what that is is a um way that foresters actually go out and use a transect and they just count four trees every so often and from that it's statistically the best way to develop information about that forest with the most important tree with the most frequent tree what's the uh diversity and um fifth graders can do it so we're developing that and you can see on the slide all the different um the different standards that go with that including quite a few of the math standards from common core um in second life uh professor of um speech pathology had built had built for him an ear and a larynx and he has given us permission to put those on biome for kids and they are bigger than life size you can walk through the ear and see how it works so those will be there um i'm going to get some of uh amy students to help me with the uh rock and mineral fossil identification um we've already talked about that and apparently they have picked up there in eighth grade seventh and eighth grade now and they have picked up some sculpting abilities so that'll be pretty cool yes they they they tend they tend to just find these it's so cool they tend to just find these cool programs and then they just start they just start doing they well they are little they they are sponges and they then they just incorporate all this stuff and and then there it goes and then things then things start from there so what we've been talking about um is what we've been doing and what we're going to do but what we would like you to do is to join us now the only people allowed in biome for kids i do have biome which anyone is allowed in but in biome for kids only teachers and children are allowed and so i have to verify them i have the best security i possibly can considering that i'm controlling it all right now and doing my own verification obviously if i had 10 000 people that would be a little rough so we'd like you to join us or visit us we do have a way for you to take a tour as well and um did i just not get to the next slide yet there we go um we would also like to invite and particularly k8 i think how older children can be there they may appreciate biome more but obviously in a k12 setting that probably the school district would probably prefer the security of biome for kids i do have some home school kids coming in and i have my own grandchildren going in and some just some uh friends children so they have an opportunity i don't want to make it a closed system where people from all over the world can't get there i want them to be able to meet each other we'd like to invite you to help us develop more instructional units even if you just give us an idea maybe we can build it we can work together that way you tell us give us an idea we'll see what we can do the other thing is consider building your own k12 grid and we do have some server space still on vibe and there's other places but um consider that and please do give us feedback come and visit give us feedback give us feedback now we'd really appreciate that and so i'm going to put up um our contact information um i you will find me i'm chloe greenwood in all the virtual world's second life and wherever you see chloe greenwood that's me never run into another one and my email address and i'm actually going to post that in the chat here if you just be patient with me a second there we go um i have a website as well for bio for kids it has everything you need to um know how to access it to get permission you have to fill out a form it has um a link to the prezi i put together for how to set up the viewer and how to access the world um it's the prezi by the way is been recognized by many different people as being very helpful and i found it shortened the um learning curve for my college students down to 30 minutes 30 minutes and they're doing what they need to do including using the camera which is a big thing so any questions or would you like to see more if you'd like to go back to any of the pictures i understand i was going through a little fast so i'd be glad to go back if there's something you'd like to see and i'm watching the chat log for that um any you want to talk about while you assessed the learning um for your units um what i did with um the the assessments for the life science um the the particular uh the particular um assessments for those assignments were in the virtual world that does not mean that the life science assessments were completely in world i had i had i still had separate um separate assessments um outside of that i had separate projects outside of that those um those particular assignment um assessments just happen to be in world which happen to be presentations and projects i really particularly liked the um the ones where they made the creatures i'm trying to get back to that slide i just think that uh they were given the uh activity they were given the scenario here's this environment you've got to build something there and they did and i was so impressed and then they could tell you why why they did so that's a great assessment if they can say this this creature has really long legs it was adapted to live in the mud so it didn't get stuck in the mud um i think that was one of them and one of them said um that the babies were more poisonous than the adults so they wouldn't get eaten like turtle babies yeah that was that was the fish the the baby fish were were spotted and those were they were they were poisonous so they had a more likely um chance of growing into adulthood which was pretty interesting yeah so they had really interesting explanations for things which was pretty cool yeah there's that one of the fish right there yeah one that you just put up most effective areas of using virtual worlds um just a reminder that our audio is behind a little bit so there's a delay there so don't think i'm ignoring we're ignoring you um i don't know son that's a really good question um i think that it's if there's a least effective environment would be something that you're just that there's no activity you can do with it but that's hard to think i mean if you're creative you can come up with activities and the first thing that came to mind was my least favorite thing to teach is anatomy because there's a femur can you say femur but wow is there's so much more interesting if you learn the femur on a giant skeleton and the condyles and the epistiles and all the stuff um i don't know if there i think it's just so broad and by the way i use the same kinds of activities many of the same kinds of activities for my college students um especially the ones that are going to be k8 teachers i teach a biology class for them and i use many of these same activities at their level so they have to learn at a higher level but they're using the same type of activities so give us some more you have any more questions or suggestions we we're looking for suggestions if you want i'll go ahead and read this one it comes from 8-bit biologists uh how much of the world building was done by your kid your guys versus you paid a builder versus found uh versus the kids built it um the only thing that i ever paid a builder for would be the larynx and ear that we're bringing in there are some things i found around the open sim universe metaverse by going out other places but the vast majority was built by me or by the kids almost all of it that's really nice it doesn't seem to have cost you very much to to be able to run your program that way no and last year i went to um our dean and i said we have a really old server and this is what we're doing and we'd like to get a new server and he said how much would that be and i gave him a piece of paper with the specs on it and he said okay so we now have a new server to run it not 11 servers like i understand some places have but um we do have a new server which helped a lot that would have been an expense but um the dean was so kindest to provide that for us okay another question from eight bid um actually more of a suggestion how helpful would it be to have the kids take a class early on say maybe like at the sixth grade level that gets them ready to work inside of a virtual world namey um really um i don't really think they need to take a class in early i think sixth grade really isn't considered early on um you have to consider the majority of kids play minecraft you know i i i honestly my students the the fifth and sixth grade students were in there for about an hour and i had a student asking my professor about uh this he was into like the systems and asking her about scripts i mean they were into like the running like the programming of the of the of it so i mean it all it all depends but um i think i think we get we don't give kids enough credit a lot of the time i think that if you let the students explore i think they would be able to figure out a lot and quite quickly um so yeah i think if you look at the kids that play minecraft um and by the way that doesn't necessarily make them better some of the kids that are the best have not played minecraft but it just using that as an example of how quickly they pick that up um children are just wired for this and there's not they don't need a lot of time to get up and running um they're helping me and in fact i introduced my grandson when he was six going into kindergarten or he was still five and he couldn't write yet to chat but he was doing building that i didn't know how to do till i'd been in second life for two years and that was it within an hour so i don't think that children need a lot of learning curve time i don't think they need a lot of preparation give them a little bit of time and that's something that uh amy did in her classroom they had free time where they could get on the computer and then she sent notes home to the parents that they could get on at home with the parents permission she had that's another thing we did um the avatars that we made there um all had the same last name and she had all the passwords so they couldn't log on at home unless she gave them the um you know the go ahead to do that and only with parents permission would she do that how much did you see your parents involvement um did they seem to be intrigued by the technology or what kind of perceptions did you get back from them um from the parents um that i did speak with they they they were interested in it um the the majority of um of um of people i spoke with once once they actually saw it they thought it was quite cool i think i think it was more um talking about it and not seeing it it was it was a little too um i guess abstract but i think looking at it they thought it was quite cool um i did show it at a school board meeting and they thought it was amazing cool they actually want to uh adopt it for the rest of the school district so they do are working on doing that yeah and also we had a couple questions there from eight bit and friends about budget and things like that um if you were to have some money for outside development would you have any idea how you would how that would best work as far as um you're being able to go out and get services like what kinds of things are you looking for and like would you turn to a storefront like kitely or someplace like that or are you looking to bring in a developer to actually build things directly as you need them one at a time i would bring in a developer and i've done that before in fact um eight bit talked about seeing the um the larynx that was built by syas sernanin which is um don bickley in real life he was what he was an undergrad at my school showed up at my door said i know about second life um we hired him at work studies um salaries he now um works for university in alaska doing this full time um so that was i would just say this is what i need this is what i need and that's what he did now that's what he does is biology labs and um as far as yeah i would i do bring in things if i could just get my coral reef i had the second life rebuilt it would be wonderful because i had so much i still have it but no place to put it um but i would you know things that i find i wander around and i bring things to use but if i could for a lot of the activities it would be really nice to have a scripter um and somebody who does a lot of mesh building because i'm not quite to that i'm not that artsy and i'm learning the scripting i used to be a really good programmer but i'm so old that was for trant and so um you know i really need to learn to do that but i it would that's what i would do yeah well there's also a lot of tools out there too but i think it's like knowing where to find things and that's really where i believe the community comes in like one of the things i learned about was websites that you basically dial up a script as opposed to your writing it yourself from scratch you know things like that for folks that aren't quite as proficient for just some of the basic stuff and then when you need stuff more on the high end you can go and hire those out yeah i do a lot of the um tweaking the scripts and using the websites and i can do that basic scripting but for instance with the um scripting of the bacteria we wanted it to be released at a certain uh probability rate and if it killed it didn't reproduce if it wasn't killed it did reproduce and that was that was just a little beyond my scripting ability or anything i could find so you know that's what i would like as far as money we're looking for a grant right now at our university to help support some of this development okay now one of the things that eight eight that was asking about is how many computers you have for the kids and what kinds of computers are they uh the types of computers um gosh we just bought new computers this year i i don't remember the brand they're not max um we have um we have two rolling laptop carts and i believe there's like 16 in each of them we have enough for all of the students so they're um and because our school is so small we typically we have like two desktops in each room and we have like two rolling laptop carts so we have more than enough for all students because we usually have between like 45 to you know 45 to like 55 kids in the school um a total so yeah we always have enough for all the kids one of the things uh when we started this amy only had about half enough um at the very beginning and so one of the things that she did was um was uh they would pair up and take turns yes and i had and at the time too we had um we had an issue with our our um our the drivers and the current and the laptops that we had but luckily we had um one of our eighth graders was a computer genius and he was able to fix our problem so we were able to we we were able to get that fixed and then get the get the systems running on all of our computer systems so that was cool i want to point out too that this is her school is not a bunch of suburban kids with you know all the gadgets at home this is very rural out in the middle of the woods one step beyond the one room school house so kind of giving you a sense of the kids that are there um you know they all take off on november 15th to go hunting so it's that's the kind of place that we live and that she teaches and so it's this is um really interesting to see these kids um picking this up so quickly yes and and there is because there there are times um there are students that do not have computers at home or do not have access to internet at home so um it is cool to see to see students excel at a program when it might not be available at home oh so many good comments i'm going to keep all of these and um please do contact this contact me in world contact me um by the email um or go to our website and um come visit us but i would like to share with you i'd like to collaborate with you and i'm sure Amy and her students would really like to get together with you and your students so thank you very much for hearing us out and um we hope to see you soon yes thank you very much well thank you carolin and amy for a very terrific presentation as a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org and the next session in this track uh will be instructional design in the v r l e environment with katherine donahue at two thirty p m thank you again to our speakers and