Nik's Learning Technology Blog

Last Sunday, I was lucky enough to make my debut as an educational chat show host on The Consultants-E's Edunation Island where I interviewed Gavin Dudeney. In an attempt to capture this moment in my personal history I decided to video record the event with the intention of editing it into a kind of 'highlights of' show.

Since I posted the first clip from this on my Quick Shout blog, I've had a number of people asking me how I recorded it and what I used, so I've decided to share what I've learned so far from creating movies in Second Life and have a think about how this could be put to use with our students. Anyway, in this article I'll start with the technology bit and how the clip above was created.

Hardware and Software

• My initial worry was that grabbing an hour of video and running my avatar and being the host of the show all from one computer was asking for trouble, so I decided to use two computers (both MACs) and run my avatar on one and record the video on the other.
• I used a MAC to record the video and some screen recording software called I-Show-U (it's not free, but it's not expensive either). The software uses a plugin called Sound Flower which enables me to record the audio coming into the computer. I've also had some success doing this on a PC with Camtasia Studio 5.
  

• Another advantage of using a separate computer to do the recording on is that when I've tried to do it before with just one, my microphone comes out much louder than the speakers coming through the computer. Most good screen recording software should have an option to record the in-coming audio from the computer, so make sure you have this option selected.

Setting up the Second Life Interface
It's important to set up the interface on the computer that you are recording on so that you get the best quality sound and minimise distraction, so ...

• On the sound controls I muted any of the unwanted sounds that i didn't want in the recording

• I also edited my preferences to make sure that there were as few on screen distractions as possible. I turned off the avatar name tags and disabled popup messages etc.

• As I was planning to go into mouse look to zoom in on the action from the back of the hall, I made sure that audio for voice chat was set to 'Hear Voice chat from camera position'.
• I reduced the frame size of the Second Life viewer, to make it a bit closer to the final output size I wanted, as I thought this would reduce the final file size and save on quality loss when the video was edited.
  

Editing Software
Once the recording was over I was left with a 1 hour / 253Mb .MOV file. To edit the file I used the free I-Movie software that came with my MAC. This was the first time I'd used it and I found it pretty easy to learn.

• One of the really great things about it is that when I save the movie I can load it directly up to my my YouTube channel in a single click.
• For those of you not blessed with a MAC Camtasia Studio 5 (which I've used for most of the SL tutorials I've created) enables you to do all the editing from within the software, so PC users don't need a separate software, though Camtasia Studio 5 isn't free (I think Camtasia Studio 3 free is though)
  

Well you've seen the results above, though the .MOV file quality is much better (but slower and larger than the YouTube version).

So What Went Wrong
As with all best made plans, plenty of things went wrong:

• The biggest problem was with avatars appearing in the centre of the coffee table during the interview! Kind of hard to know how to prevent this kind of thing.

• Also of course if you leave a computer idle for long enough, even though it's recording it can start to hibernate, or a screen saver can appear! So worth changing those energy saving settings.
• And of course how ever many of those popup messages you disable there's always one you miss!
  

Anyway, I hope after trying this I'm a bit wiser and next time it will go a lot smoother.
If you have any experience of creating film from Second Life, by all means leave a comment. Or if you think I've made any big mistakes omissions here, by all means try to put me right,

Look forward to your comments and in part two of this article I'll be looking at ways to exploit filming with students.

Related links:

• Killer Apps in Second Life
• Coffee With Gavin Dudeney in Second Life
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Building in Second Life
• More Second Life Tutorials
• Lip Sync for Second Life
• Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life

Best

Nik Peachey

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey

For me, one of the main blocks to really developing online language learning courses has been the inability to supply real communicative speaking practice. VOIP software like Skype has certainly pushed the bounds of what is possible, as has the development of more effective web based video conferencing platforms, but in my opinion the biggest step towards making this possible has been the developments made in virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life which not only enable the use of voice, but can also help students to develop an understanding gesture and spatial relationships while speaking.

For anyone interested in giving it a try, here are four basic tutorial videos to help you get started with how voice works in Second Life and how you can use it for pair and group work.

Setting up voice
This video shows you how to activate the voice client and make sure that the quality of your sound is good. It also shows you how to select the correct input and output devices for sound in case you are having any problems.



Using the active speaker window
This video shows you how to find and use the active speaker window. This enables you to find out who is within 'voice range' of you, as well as enabling you to balance out the volume of the voices around you and even to mute other speakers if you just want to listen in to one person.



Using 'IM Call' for pair and group work
If you have large groups of students all in close proximity to each other, running activities like pair or group work can be chaotic as everyone hears what everyone else is saying. This video shows you how to use the 'IM Call' feature to put the students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people they are working with. Then you as the teacher can move between the groups monitoring, without having to hear the whole class all at once.



Balancing out relative volumes
Second Life has a lot of different sound sources, such as the ambient sound of trees and water around you, the sounds of gestures, background music, media players and th voices of people speaking. This video shows you how to balance out the sounds and turn off the ones you don't want to hear.



I would be really interested to hear comments from anyone who has used Video conferencing and or Second Life. Which do you prefer?

If you are new to or haven't tried Second Life yet, then I hope you find these videos useful and they encourage you to try it out. The videos were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best
Nik Peachey

My other postings on Second Life and virtual worlds

• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

Visit my YouTube Channel to watch more of my videos
http://youtube.com/NikPeachey

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.


The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.

Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2.

Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want.

This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback.

I've always avoided using audio on my own blog ones as I'm a bit self-conscious about my voice and I've felt that using text makes them easier to understand and keeps the file sizes a bit smaller. Any feedback on this would be very welcome as I'm considering changing over and using voice more.

Anyway. I hope you like the videos and find them useful. There's also a wealth of other useful materials on Russell's site, (as I said in my review of it last year) so be sure to check out the rest of it when you get a minute.

Best

Nik

PS: The image above is of my avatar in my Second Life office. Feel free to visit and look around. It's on Edunation Island at: http://tinyurl.com/ytz5go

I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!

Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.

• Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.
• Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two versions
• Silent with better image quality (2.1 Mb wmv)
• Lower quality one with music (500k wmv)

I know there are a lot of online Web 2.0 ap that do all of this too, but for those of us with slower, unreliable or more expensive connections, it's nice to have a bit of software that can do the job for us without using any bandwidth at all (apart from downloading it of course).

You should be able to download Photo Story 3 from here.
It's a 5 Mb download, so that shouldn't take too long even over a dial up connection.

How to use this with students
You can use it to create multimedia materials for your students, whether is for use in class or to take home for homework. Here's some things you can do:

• Create some narratives for them to view
• Create narratives which illustrate grammar points
• Create a series of pictures and words which illustrate different sounds from the Phonemic alphabet

Having software like this that can produce a professional looking end product can be really motivating for students and really help them to push themselves to produce accurate polished work. Here's some things you can get your students to do:
It's ideal for presenting the results of project work.

• Get the students to take photographs and upload them to tell their own stories to the class
• What they do each day
• What they did at the weekend / on holiday
• Stories about their family
• Get some pictures from Flickr and get the students to order them and create a story around them.

What I liked about it

• It's free
• Easy to use and quick to learn
• Really liked some of the filter effects
• Liked the way you can easily create a wide range of background musics
• File sizes were quite reasonable and exports pretty easily for a number of different devices

What I wasn't so keen on

• It's a shame that it's so limited in the the formats that it exports to (mainly different sizes of wmv) , but I guess there are plenty of converters you could use if you wanted to change it for an i-pod or something like that.
• I also thought that a bit more control over how the text was placed over the images would have been really handy.
• There's no version for MAC of course, but if you have a MAC you won't need this as you get lots of nice stuff that does all this for you ready installed when you buy it.

Photo Story 3 isn't a revolutionary piece of software by any means, but I'm sure it can be used to really engage your students in some enjoyable learning.

Hope it works for you

Best

Nik

Over the past few weeks I've been pretty busy teaching my first English students on a Business English course I have been developing for Second Life.

The experience has been pretty daunting with myself and the students having to come to terms with the complexities of the user interface and I have felt at times that my fifteen years of 'real world' classroom experience and the subconscious habits and reflexes that I developed over that period have totally deserted me.

The introduction of voice within SL has certainly made a huge difference, though there are still problems and bugs to be ironed out. Though to my surprise I did find myself drilling a group of advanced learners to help them with their word stress, something I rarely do in the 'real' language classroom. To my relief though, the number of students in the class seems to be steadily increasing rather than decreasing and they seem keen to come back for more.

As part of the course I've found it necessary to give a lot of help with the user interface, especially with some of the complexities of manipulating the voice client to get students into pairs and groups without having to shift them across the island so they don't overhear each other.

I've created these videos which have been really useful both for myself and my students, so I thought I'd share them here. I hope that anyone involved in teaching in SL finds them useful, and anyone who isn't involved gets some insight into how this tool can be used, particularly for language learning.

• This one shows how you can get students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people you are working with. (Be careful though. This feature still seems to be a bit buggy)
  View the movie
  
• This one shows how can use the 'Active Speaker' panel so that you can change the volume of the other speakers around you or mute them.
  View the movie
  
• This one shows you how to create a note card to take notes during the lesson.
  View the movie
  
• This one shows how to copy notes from Second Life note cards into a Word document (If you want to keep copies of your notes outside of SL)
  View the movie
  
• This one shows you how to share and pass note cards to other avatars / students.
  View the movie
  
• This first one shows you how to set up the interface so that you can listen to audio and watch video.
  View the movie
  
• This one shows you how to use the camera tools to take pictures / snapshots within Second Life.
  View the movie
  

Hope you enjoy and benefit from these. Please feel free to leave comments.

Best Nik Peachey

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying out the new voice client for Second Life and despite a few remaining bugs with voice groupings it seems to work pretty well. It is sensitive to distance and location! If you turn around while someone is speaking to you, it really does sound like they are behind you etc.

It is possible to put groups / pairs of students (avatars) into different groups so that they can only hear the 'person' within their pair or group and for the 'teacher' to switch between groups to listen in on how each group is doing. (though this is still buggy at present)

This is really going to open up the potential for language teaching.

How to try it out

• If you want to try the voice client out. You will need to download a separate 'First look Viewer'. You can get this from: http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php
• It seems to run fine on both MAC and PC.
• If you can't get it to work, it could be that either your firewall or anti-virus is blocking it, so you may need to check your settings.
• You'll also need a reasonably good quality microphone and headset, preferably with USB connection.
• NOTE: Not all areas within SL are voice enabled
• To find voice enabled areas check out this map
  

I hope you enjoy this and by all means leave a comment to say how you got on.

I was recently lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation on course and materials design for Second Life at the SLanguages 2007 virtual conference (June 23rd 2007) which took place on the Edunation Island in Second life. The conference itself was a fascinating event and the experience of presenting a conference paper within a virtual world to an audience of avatars was certainly a new and novel one for me.

I was asked to give this presentation because I have been working over the last few months on designing a Business English course for Second Life. As part of putting together the presentation I came up with a list of lessons I’ve learnt while going through the process of designing the course. The list is by no means finalised and I’m sure it will continue to grow and change as I learn more about developing materials for this world, but I thought I’d publish it here for anyone who is interested in designing their own materials for language teaching in SL.

For anyone who hasn’t already visited Second Life then you can download some instructions from here and see how it is done (1.3Mb pdf). Be warned though. To access SL you need to have a good broadband connection and quite a powerful computer. See system requirements

So here is my list of things to think about if you are trying to design teaching materials for Second Life. Feel free to leave comments.

Tips for language learning materials design in Second Life

1. Design outside the classroom box and into the computer game box
Think about the kinds of common computer game genre. They are really quite limited. The main ones are things like

• Driving or flying games (Grand Prix racing etc)
• Shooter games (Kill everything in sight etc.)
• Sports type games ( Football, Golf etc.)
• Strategy type games ( Zoo Tycoon, Hotel Tycoon etc.)
• Sims type games (The Sims, Sims 2 Pets etc.)

Think about how these can be made collaborative and why students playing them might need to communicate. Admittedly, it’s much easier to produce these types of games if you have an island and a team of technicians to work on them for you. If you haven’t there are still plenty of things you can do using places and objects already built in world. If you get your students to go to Nissan Altima Island they can pick up there own car, which they can either use there or anywhere else to have a driving competition. On AOL Pointe they can get their own skateboard and a collection of tricks to do on it. There are numerous places to play just about any sport you can think of. Finding and learning how to use these objects and places could be a communicative task in itself.

2. Build in ownership of the environment
If you have your own Island why not build a student area of some kind. Somewhere they can post their own materials, pictures etc. or give them their own room to decorate.

3. Give students control of their learning / activities
When you design learning tasks like role-plays let students be themselves, don’t try too hard to orchestrate things like what they will do, where they will be or what they will say. Good role-play is like jazz improvisation, you provide a structure and students improvise within it.

4. Make learning and task goals clear to students
Sounds obvious, but when we know why they are doing things we often take it foregranted that students know. This often isn’t the case, so be sure to let your students know why you want them to do something and what you think they should be achieving.

5. Make sure that students get individualised feedback on their performance
Especially in virtual world activities where students are in reality quite isolated and really sitting at home on a computer alone, it’s very important that they get some feedback on their performance and know how they are doing. Keeping note cards at the ready while you are monitoring your students can be really handy for making notes to pass to them at the end of the lesson.

6. Maximise student to student interaction
Now that Second life is going to have voice communication for everyone, there is no excuse for the activities to be tutor led. Let the students work together. Be sure to explore the voice capabilities and look at how you can group and pair students for voice chat.

7. Breakdown texts into smaller chunks and make ‘input’ tasks collaborative.
SL isn’t a text driven environment and doesn’t really lend itself to reading long texts. It’s much better to divide your texts up by giving a small chunk to each student on a note card, and then get them to reconstruct the overall meaning collaboratively.


8. Make the activities engaging on a mental (cognitive), personal and a cultural level
SL offers us the opportunity to connect people from all around the world, so be sure that your tasks and activities draw on that international experience and exploit the unique experiences that each student brings from their culture.

9. Build the materials into the immediate SL environment
SL is a wonderfully rich graphic environment. Try to make sure your materials exploit that immediate environment. Get students doing things in different places and moving around. Don’t just try to recreate a classroom in SL, remember the most successful language learning that happens goes on outside the classroom.

10. Make tasks relevant to real life and real SL life
The borders between real life and SL are becoming increasingly blurred. Think about how virtual 3D worlds will become integrated into our everyday lives and the kinds of skills people will need to operate and communicate in them effectively.

11. Exploit the ‘authentic’ SL world
There are lots of interesting and novel things to do and places to go in SL, so why not exploit them and design activities around them? Get students to go out in groups and explore and create reports, plan trips and tours for each other, bring back experiences to share with other class members.

12. Exploit the SL user interface
The SL user interface is an incredibly useful tool and has lots of features that can be used creatively. The snapshot tool can help students to create magazine reports with wonderful graphics or a photo diary of their experiences. The movie tool can help students to create machinima. They can use it to create their own video interviews, advertisements, or record role plays or drama productions.

13. Train learners to exploit the SL user interface / develop good IT literacy / study skills.
The user interface can also be used more or less effectively as a study tool, to take notes make records or to share information. Make sure that you train students to use it effectively, so that it aids rather than obstructs their study.

14. Build in social interaction
Knowledge is socially constructed and language is a social function. Try to design social time and space into your course and your tasks.

15. Create and exploit information gaps
Make sure that you create the need to communicate within your tasks. Creating information gap type activities is relatively easy in SL as you have a lot of control about how and who you give information to.

16. Develop and exploit the students’ relationship to their avatar
The SL avatar that represents your student can become a vehicle for the expression of their personality. Think about how you can involve this relationship between student and avatar in your activities.

The Slanguage 2007 conference was sponsored by The consultants-e
Video and audio transcripts of the presentations can be found on the Edunation Island at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation/178/40/22/

If you are a teacher and you are interested in developing language teaching materials for Second Life or doing some language teaching there get in touch with The consultants-e as they are now running seminars and training sessions in SL.