This blog has seen many incarnations but strives to remain true to its original purpose: “A running account of the proposal, acquisition, develpment, and implementation of the virtual presence of Ramapo Central School District on the Teen Grid of Second Life”
My bio can be found HERE. 
Keep the fire burning! Let the children play!
4 responses so far ↓
I’m delighted to let you know that Suffern Middle School in Second Life has been featured in Childnet’s Young People and Social Networking Services report – so thank you for providing such a great example to include
http://www.digizen.org/socialnetworking/ideas.aspx
I’ve posted a very brief overview and index to the whole thing at my own blog:
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/06/young-people-an.html
Best wishes, Josie Fraser.
Like you, I too am an educator interested in using TSL as an instructional tool. Just six months ago Southern Lehigh School District, located in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, opened the district’s island in TSL called Sparta Island. Our goal is to offer distance and extended educational pedagogy in the near future. Professionally second language virtual immersive instructional environments and perfecting Socratic seminars in a MUVE are immediate goals of mine. Other teachers within the middle school that I teach with are interested in book discussions and creating virtual libraries. This coming April we plan on hosting our first ever student film festival broadcasted both live n our middle school auditorium and over the Internet, but streamed into our island live. Then the island will be opened for other teens to participate in and not just students from our school. We have the ability to open the island to all teens, but then close it on a select group.
Your online presence has been an excellent resource for me as I jumped head first into the virtual waters of MUVE with few to follow. Your district’s activities have been followed by me most recently and have proved to be most useful. At SLMS we are encouraging our students to register through the usual SL channels and we have the ability to create avs for island use as well (regAPI) when needed.
In talking to the developer of our fine island, the word is that there may be the technology in the near future (this year) to connect all educational islands in TSL, while preventing outside interventions from other teens and keep our islands “technically” closed. Exciting!
Again, like you, we too will be launching a blog and a wiki site as a reference source for others soon this year. Establishing collaboration between our schools would be greatly appreciated.
James Fullerton
Fullertonj@slsd.org
Hi Peggy!
I am doing a body image unit as my final project in my multimedia class – inspired by your work with SL avatars at your middle school. I was wondering if you have any of the screen shots of the side by side comparisons done of the media VS real beauty avatars done by your students.
I would use them as part of my unit… and since I don’t have a “real” job yet, it won’t really be used outside of this project.
Let me know if you’d be willing to share the images. Thank you so much!
Peggy, I am new to all this. I wanted to use Second Life to teach Social Studies. I wanted a way for my students to re-create, for instance, the Roman Empire and navigate through the Collosium. How would I go about setting this up. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Karen
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