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Avatar Languages Blog

Second Life as a Social Learning Environment (Presentation at SLanguages 2009)

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

One of our students, Pierre Moussy, has been using the 3d virtual world, Second Life, to gain conversation practice. His presentation below was given at the SLanguages conference (for language education in virtual worlds); you can listen to Pierre’s presentation and follow his PowerPoint. Pierre’s talk is especially interesting because it gives us some insights into how languages learners actually use second life to talk with others in a foreign language. It also shows us how they benefit from such experiences and how language teachers can better guide their students so that they gain the most from virtual worlds.

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How To Add 3 D To Language Classes

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Virtual worlds such as Second Life can be easily added to classroom-based or online language lessons. Virtual worlds offer a 3D immersive experience to be included as an optional extra.

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Google Maps Street View for Language Learning

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Google Maps must surely be changing the way we use maps – especially now that it offers “Street View” for several countries. Street View allows you to see what the streets actually look like, thanks to a Google car driving around lots of cities and photographing almost every street at intervals of every few yards. It also offers language learning new immersive opportunities.

A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.

View Larger Map

In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.

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3D Virtual Tourism for Language Learning: The Forbidden City

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

The Forbidden Palace in Beijing has been rebuilt as a 3D mini-virtual world by IBM and could be used not just for virtual tourism, but for language learning too.

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