The Teen Grid: Bringing Your School into Second Life
Second Life, which offers an virtual world complete with avatars to represent human visitors, has intrigued some educators. The popular graphical online world, with land, commerce, buildings, and social networking, seems to offer educational potential, but how to get started?
Teachers, media specialists, and others who want to explore the learning potential of Second Life in the classroom might benefit from a conversation with Peggy Sheehy, library media specialist at Suffern Middle School, a high-performing school in Suffern, NY, about 30 miles northwest of New York City.
Sheehy is the originator of Ramapo Islands, Suffern Middle School's presence in the Teen Grid area of Second Life. Suffern has maintained a private learning environment there since August 2006. Teachers who want help developing curricula for Second Life, help convincing administrators of the benefits of the virtual world, or simply an understanding of how to get started, might benefit from Sheehy's experience.
At Suffern, 800 students and 15 eighth-grade teachers participated in Second Life this year, with projects that covered subjects ranging from math to family consumer science to art, health, and social studies.