The Magic School Bus

Today I shared about Second Life at the JMU Content Academy on Educational Technology. There were about 30 teachers from around the state who are spending the whole week learning about new developments in ed. tech. Second Life may be a little out there for most folks, but it was a very receptive audience with many good questions and ideas. There was a lot of joking about furries.

After a little background on SL, I demo'ed SL and Funaria Moose joined us briefly and said hello. Jimbo Berkman (founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales in RL) was even kind enough to say hi to the group. We looked at Neufreistadt and the NOAA sim, but there seemed to be a lot of lag. Nonetheless, about half the group then used their free computer time to download SL and check it out.

My favorite part of the presentation was brainstorming how SL could be used by teachers in a variety of subject areas. At the beginning of the presentation I told them to imagine they had a "Magic School Bus" and could take their students anywhere. What would they do? Here are some of the ideas we came up with that could be applied to Second Life:
Health - body image (as Suffern Middle School recently showed us)
Science - under the ocean, go inside organs, change gravity
Social Studies - travel to a historical place, form a government, economic mini-society
Language Arts/ESL/Foreign Language - go to a place where people speak the target language, empathy exercise in a sim using a language you don't know, recreate a book
Math - set up a shopping center for consumer math, geometric shapes using prims
Computer science - learn about programming with LSL, CAD practice
All - guest speakers

What other ideas do you have for using SL for things you couldn't do more easily elsewhere?