Sunday, December 09, 2007

Using Second Life with a Whiteboard


overlay tools allowed visual annotation over SL during crits.

With a recently installed Promethean ActiveBoard in the studio, we tried a recording of a crit during a studio session.
This was our first opportunity of explore Second Life controlled by the activeboard kit, as well as another way of bringing SL into a blended learning environment.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play
extract from recorded crit

Using the popup movement and camera controls within SecondLife, the avatar could be controlled via a pen or activeslate. With both a user operating at the board, and an activeslate being passed around, several users could puppeteer an avatar.
The inbuilt screen capture software, recorded both the onscreen action and the group's voices via the laptops microphone.

As first thoughts, this technology quickly enabled us to do a walkthrough of a SL work, with a student evaluating or commenting on the work in realtime. This would be a great way to evidence the process and learning outcomes of the student in a Second Life project. It also creates a video file for use by Second Markers or External examiners - that have no experience of using SL.

as this was a first attempt it revealed issues to resolve:

i) better microphone - or microphone placement to record a group of students clearly.
ii) some experimentation with video capture settings to get a better frames per second.
iii) set aside some time to show students (and other staff ) how to use the whiteboard tools.

2 comments:

ActivEducator said...

That is such a clever use of the Activboard tools - pens, highlighters and screen recorder.

Capturing it all live with talk and discussion really helps make for an authentic recording. Way to go!

Hope we see more on this approach...

Anonymous said...

Yeah, this is really neat. Has anybody used this software with Promethen's multi-input software? Does anybody have it yet?