Season greetings!

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday:)

Here are some thoughts about this time of the year!

Oprah Winfrey

Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right.

Edith Lovejoy Pierce

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called "Opportunity" and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,

That's not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,

We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,

We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,

We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,

We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,

And that's the burden of a year.

Have a great New Year!

Exploring educational places

MUVEnation Course
Activity 1, section 3, module 1 - group 1.3 - Chestnut

As all the Chestnut members seem interested in the topic Teaching in Second Life but belong to different fields, it was suggested to define subtopics according to our professional fields.

Then the search began. First I used the search engine Google. I used the key words “Teaching English in Second Life” and I accessed some interesting articles about the topic such as it can be found in the following links:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/03/using-second-li.html
http://esl.about.com/b/2008/11/05/teaching-english-in-second-life.htm
http://thegridlive.com/2007/08/29/teaching-english-in-second-life/
But there were no indications of SLurls.

Delicious wasn’t very helpful either or SLbrowser. Only with the search facilities in Second Life was I able to find the following SLurls that I advise people to explore.


So, I chose Teaching English in Second Life. I selected three islands as follows:

1- Virtlantis 122, 115, 23
This is a place where anyone can improve his/her English according to one's needs in an
autonomous way. All the island is worth visiting. For example: We can find a BBC Grammar
Challenge (Quiz, audio, grammar explanation)

2- Education UK 239, 52, 21
This island is also an educational place where we can find virtual WebQuests. It helps people
to design virtual WebQuests based on Bernie Dodge's work: a structured learning activity
which develops into several phases: introduction, task, process, resources, evaluation and
conclusion. They are suited for almost all subject areas.

3- English Village 140, 118, 110
It's a sim for language teachers where people can learn English in a very varied way: watching
a movie or TV, attending an event, going dancing (...) or just engaging in a chat. All in English.

To see some pictures of these inworlds, please go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/morgenstring/