COMMUNITY PROFILE

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. We have two ongoing projects that involve Second Life and teachers from local high schools and middle schools. The proposed Appalachian Ohio Second Life Professional Learning Community will allow us to leverage on existing resources and connections to intensify the involvement of teachers in Second Life-related activities as well as reach out to other teachers who may be interested in Second Life but are not involved in these two projects. Most importantly, the proposed PLC will enable all involved teachers and faculty members to have discussions that are focused on teaching and learning in Second Life, which are merely side topics in current project discussions in these two projects.

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 produce the following deliverables from this project.

• A virtual replica of the Stocker Engineering Building, which will be used as our 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

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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