Appalachian Ohio Second Life Professional Learning Community
Introducing immersive learning environments to Appalachian Ohio K-12 schools

Second Life (www.secondlife.com) is a massively multiplayer synthetic world that supports rich communication, virtual collaboration, and 3-D content creation. The Second Life synthetic world has great potential for teaching and learning. At Ohio University, we are uniquely positioned to be the first to bring Second Life to high schools and middle schools. This is because 1) We have experience in using Second Life in teaching and learning; 2) We have an ongoing project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in which we work with eight science teachers from six local middle schools to bring engaging game-like teaching aids to middle school classroom, some of which are developed in Second Life; and 3) We have another ongoing project funded by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in which we work with two local high schools to help high school students develop environmental education games using Second Life. Our past experience and existing projects uniquely positioned us to bring Second Life to high schools and middle schools. We are therefore interested in continuing an Appalachian Ohio Second Life Professional Learning Community for K-12 teachers.

The goal of this learning community is to 1) create teaching aids and interactive science experiments in Second Life that are based on the Ohio K-12 Science Academic Content Standards, 2) help K-12 teacher community members learn to use our Second Life teaching aids in class, and 3) establish an active community of K-12 teachers and Ohio University faculty members who are interested in introducing synthetic worlds to classroom.

We plan to meet virtually in Second Life once every four weeks during academic quarters, during which time we exchange ideas about innovative use of Second Life in teaching and learning, play with different teaching aids, watch demonstrations, and share new things we discovered in Second Life. In addition, we plan to meet physically either locally or when we attend the three events recommended by OLN.
We plan to produce the following deliverables from this project.
• A virtual interactive science lab.
• A number of standard-based teaching aids and virtual scientific experiments in Second Life that can be used in high school and middle school classes.

Click here to download the Portrait of Practice (pdf).

OLN Southeast Regional Center at Shawnee State University in Partnership with the Teaching and Learning Center 940 Second St., Portsmouth, OH 45662 (740) 351-3334