A trend that I am watching closely is the use of virtual worlds in education. I have been exploring and have purchased two books to help me with this- "Second Life the official guide" and "Second Life for Dummies". I have to say that I find "Second Life for Dummies" to be more helpful. I have mastered the basics of navigating my avatar (see Glorious Guisse in the Boise State Second Life site at left) but I have not yet been successful in really seeing how virtual worlds can be applied to education in my field. I definitely need the Boise State course that I plan on taking next spring. I did find one chiropractic site with a chiropractic clinic. I think that there are applications that I can use in my teaching but I have a long way to go with this. I'm also concerned about the time it takes for a student to get up to speed with learning how to navigate in Second Life. Maybe I am just a slow learner.
Using Virtual Worlds in Science Teaching
This link will bring you to a PDF document published in the March 2008 issue of Cable in the Classroom that contains a number of sites that use virtual worlds to teach K-12 science. I hope to find some sites that are appropriate for university students in anatomy and physiology and health care. Let me know if you come across something.
Glori aka "Glorious Guisse"
2 comments:
I haven't had the opportunity to play around in virtual worlds yet. A colleague of mine is participating in a Second Life course this semester in a MBA program through UW-Oshkosh. She agreed with you that the learning curve on top of the regular coursework is more than a handfull. But I suspect, that like course management applications, virtual teaching and learning will become second nature for people and the learning curve eventually won't be much of an issue.
Nice post! This is a very interesting trend indeed.
Hi Glori!
Your blog is very nice! I found the Virtual World post to be especially interesting. Can you tell me how you have been thinking of using a virtual world in your science classroom? I am a middle school Spanish teacher and think that this would open a whole world of opportunities to the Spanish student, but I am not familiar with them myself and I'm not sure of the possibilities. Maybe it's time for me to buy the Dummies book to get started! :)
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