Peggy Sheehy at Suffern Middle School in New York began using Second Life with her students in early April (at least it appears that way on her blog).

Her blog provides several examples of what I believe is quality, value-added use of SL; they are developing “authentic learning projects that allow learners to engage learning content through interaction with communities and/or creation of content or products in a manner not possible through a physical or standard web-based learning environment.”

Specifically, the rough draft plan Peggy describes for a Health class lesson on Self Image is outstanding. Certainly, read the blog entry for full details, but in short, students will consider media portrayals of “real beauty” and, as best they can and from their own perspective, create their avatar in their own image. They’ll then reflectively discuss, via SL, the avatars they created. Randomly assigned groups will then create attractive and unattractive avatars according to popular media standards, including boys creating attractive/unattractive female avatars and vice-versa. The avatar creation activity will be followed by “all four groups [will] hold[ing] a discussion about how they look, how they react to each other and why.”

Brilliant use of SL, in my humble opinion. Certainly, this sort of activity may have been engaged before in a face-to-face classroom, perhaps even with the use of computers to digitally enhance or alter photos to create more or less attractive self images. However, there’s an incredibly powerful authentic opportunity in SL for learners to create an appearance and then assume that appearance throughout a discussion, and potentially, over the course of several interactions with other learners in a social environment. That is truly a value-added use of Second Life to enhance the learning experience.

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