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Showing posts from September, 2009

Language Teaching in Second Life - A Review

Time for a review of language teaching in Second Life. This post was prompted by a request from someone who wanted to observe a class in SL. This is the best place to ask for a Second Life class observation opportunity:  https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators As for observing classes, I was very impressed with the observations that I did while undertaking a teacher training course for language educators in Second Life, run by http://www.languagelab.com . They are a serious language school, with a sizable city in Second Life, employing highly trained teachers and teacher trainers and material designers and are doing the most when it comes to really using Second Life well for language teaching. I suggest contacting them - they may not be running another teacher training course for a while, but you could always sign up to take Spanish or Italian and get to observe teachers in action Avatar Languages is another language school that is also active, but the cla

Digital Play - a new blog

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I've started a new blog with a colleague and friend, Kyle Mawer , called Digital Play, which you can find here: http://www.digitalplay.info/blog / The blog will specialise in collecting news, information and ideas for teachers who want to use computer games and other digital toys to help language learners in and out of class. This is something that we both have been involved in for several years now, especially in our jobs as teachers of young learners. During this time, we have tried out different ideas of exploiting digital games with young learners of English and teenagers, and have introduced a lot of our colleagues to using these too. The interest has grown and now many of our colleagues turn to lesson plans and worksheets featuring online games when they have a computer room slot. Of course, we have presented our ideas about using digital games at various conferences and have had articles and ideas published in various places too. The next, natural step seemed to be to set up