rene2009

Limited time seemed to only allow me to create work and not to journal about it this past week. I find that I only want to do after finding the resources and not write about it. I suppose I will never be a good scientist :-(

I did get to sit in on a couple of lectures and roundtables by educators in SL. I’ve noted that more and more participants in these are coming with experience now, teaching in SL, rather than just talking about wanting to or asking how to. The latest discussions underscore my need to create a SLOODLE educational experience that can be easily assessed by my peers. Not an easy task, but I must to make all this effort worth my while. First, this adds so much validity to this platform and secondly, these are the kinds of assessments that generally get left out of portfolios – the techie kind. I imagine to most mainstream, all this virtual stuff just sounds like sci-fi and teacher-wannabe’s. I’ll need to make my potential and progress in this platform clear and real to the naysayers and naive ones in trying to pursue more teaching opportunities and eventually trying to make tenure.

Anyway, I loved that there is more “been there – done that” in SLED and SLOODLE in higher education. I can refer to such much more in validating the use of SLOODLE, Moodle, and SL.

My focus will now turn to my presentation. Giddy-up!

This week I mostly spent time digging deeper into the sites that I found earlier, following links to educators to find other folks who are using SLOODLE. I don’t know if there is any easier process for this. It’s vastly time-consuming to follow links and explore their (sometimes unorganized) websites to find real work being done using the SLOODLE too.

I’m going to try and move away from this aspect this week, and look at some practicums for COE students so that I can try and create a SLOODLE assignment that would give the future teachers an experience that neither their course classroom nor practicum classroom can give them.

This is really going to exercise some of the search measures that we’ve been talking about in class, as there is much more to paw through in the subject area of COE practicums than SLOODLE.

I was definitely engrossed in how-to videos and exploring the SLOODLE side of SL this week. I jotted down notes for what made a tutorial simple and how I navigated and the steps I took in SL so that I can make a tutorial for the newbie teachers of SL. Phfew! I might have to make a Machina (a movie within SL). I think it’s quite possible to actually have instructors operating inside SL without too much prior experience. This week I will concentrate on a how-to tutorial for students. I think that is going to be much more challenging as it will be more activity-based as opposed to being observant. I may have to rethink a SLOODLE activity that is the simplest. Maybe I can find landmarks where students could report back there visual observations. That way, all they would have to do is navigate through an area, as opposed to operating or interacting, or more so, building something (which is the cool benefit of a SLOODLE.) Baby steps….yes b-a-b-y s-t-e-p-s.