August 8

Emerging Technologies: Virtual Worlds and their application in the classroom

The IT guy and I attended a lecture this week on “Virtual Worlds and their application in the classroom” at ACU. Although there wasn’t much on the lecture on applications to the classroom, he showed us quite a bit around second life, and the application sto university. IT guy and I were really excited by the opportunity to create and model virtual systems, particularly for their application to IPT and Industrial Tech. I believe that in Ind Tech, that a large component of the technology would be applicable to this form of delivery.

So, I put in some hours of research navigating around the second life website (which is very badly set up for new users I might add) and eventually found out that the prices were way too prohibative for our budget.

Funnily enough, I was researching on the MIT Technology Review website, about my branding essay, and found out that Google (of course) have a free version, Lively that does pretty much the same thing for the classroom, but that is totally free.

So, I’m currently in the testing phase. I’m even considering possibly changing one of the topics in year 10 IST to modelling and simulation, which we got rid of years ago, because we only taught spreadsheets in it. Now, we have 3D studio max, and this….wonder if it’s still in the new syllabus?

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