Avatar Languages Blog

We all have to start somewhere, and this is the first post of the new blog on the first day of August.

Graham Davies

Today I met with Graham Davies (EUROCALL and ICT4LT), who was the Director of TVU School of Languages when I was studying German and Russian there. We met in Second Life, of course, and I’m including a picture of the two of us chatting on EduNation island (I have the soda).

We talked about the upcoming EUROCALL (European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning) conference in Coleraine, N Ireland, 5-8 September, 2007. There will be a virtual strand, which I hope to attend.

Podcasting

Avatar English is working on using other technologies besides Second Life for teaching. I am especially interested in (student created) podcasts, blogging and virtual quests (see VirtualQuests.net for more info on them) for use alongside or even integrated into SL teaching.

One of my students, Pierre from France, is currently working on a web quest to produce a travel podcast for Berlin. We will put it up on the school’s website as soon as Pierre has finished it. Pierre’s feedback is very positive, he says he feels like he is working towards something that has results.

It is certainly a less formally structured approach to lesson planning, as lesson(s) plan is really the task. However, it throws up plenty of language skills issues (areas Pierre needs to work on) and encourages Pierre to find new ways of expressing himself. It is clearly a much more student-centred approach and I am looking forward to working with other students on this.

The next stage is to develop a similar task for use within SL (Pierre is doing this in an RL environment).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 7:33 pm and is filed under AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, TECHNOLOGIES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.