Languagelab.com Blog

Appearance is important in RL and it cannot be taken for granted in SL. In Second Life you can look as you wish, you can even look like any animal. This flexibility is great for teachers. You can change your image according to the lesson you are teaching. Changing your appearance is an easy and fast process:

• Right click on your avatar
• Choose “Appearance”

You can also access the window, by clicking on the “Edit” and “Appearance” options at the top menu. Here you can find all the options to modify the character:

• Shape: Body, Head, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Mouth, Chin, Torso, Legs
• Skin: Skin Color, Face Detail, Eyes, Makeup, Body Detail, Legs
• Hair: Color, Style, Eyebrows
• Eyes: change eyes color
• Clothes: Shirt, Pants, Shoes, Socks, Jacket, Gloves, Undershirt, Underpants, Skirt.

You can use textures and colors to enhance your avatar by applying them to your avatar’s skin and clothing. Inventory items to wear can be found in your Library folder. Open your inventory, find something to try on. Right-click the file and select “wear” or drag each item from your inventory onto your avatar. You can also find free clothes and body parts (shapes, skins, hair, eyes) in different places in SL.
To take off clothes: right-click on your avatar and select “take off”. Quick change: Drag a clothing folder with an outfit from Inventory and drop it on your Avatar.

You can change your appearance to make a topic more real, for example, dressing as a doctor or nurse if you are teaching about health, a hospital, etc. Wearing an animal avatar if teaching about animals. Quickly changing clothes is very handy for teaching clothes and colors. Your imagination is the limit!

Tutorial Links here for Changing appearance and

Clothing:

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As I have said in previous posts, when we teach beginners we need to make use of visuals and interactive activities.
One of the first things that made it difficult for me to design a lesson in Second Life was my lack of knowledge of the kind of tools
I could use to teach in that environment. We know that in a Real Life classroom we can use overhead projectors, video players,
video beams, maps, whiteboards, among many others, and the tools labeled as web 2.0 have made the process of planning e-based
lessons very easy. However, I did not know what tools I could use in SL. To solve this problem, I started a search for
educational tools, and found many free tools as well as tools that can be bought from different designers. At the same time,
I learned that I could create simple objects adding textures, sound and ready-made scripts to make them interactive.
For more sophisticated tools, Languagelab has technicians who can create them for us. Nowadays, with this knowledge, planning
is easier but also a challenge to the imagination.

In order to have images and text shown on boards in SL, we have to upload textures (images) created in Power Point or any image editor
such as Photoshop, Paint Shop etc. Two excellent free solutions are Paint.NET (Windows only),
and Gimp, etc.
Sounds can be uploaded in Wav format. They cannot be longer that 10 seconds
which is a restriction for language teaching. However, you can use sounds from the web. The downside is that for every image and sound
we have to pay 10 Linden $

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It’s fantastic having the opportunity to teach and/or participate in a lesson in a virtual world written by a qualified, experienced
teacher who has thought about how to really get the best out of a virtual world.
Paul Swindells wrote this week’s lesson. He’s also known by his online
avatar’s name of ‘Zakarias Trenchcoat’. You’ve probably
met him in class or hosting one of LanguageLab’s specially organised student
events.

The gallery was full of paintings that exemplified the
past 500 years of Western Art. There were loads of interesting activities designed to help students, not just to increase
vocabulary and practice talking about art but to be able to describe things in detail and express opinions about the meaning
and central themes of the paintings.

My favorite activity was studying a painting for one minute then turning our backs to it and trying to describe it to our
partners in as much detail as possible without looking at it. It was interesting to talk about the western art tradition and
I learned some fascinating things from hearing the students’ presentations. I hope we can come back soon to practice English
and discuss art from other cultures.

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Look, see,
watch, peep,
peer, stare,
glance, gaze,
behold…

When students first come to Languagelab, I realised that poor camera control was an obstacle for learning effectively.
It is important to be able to read information and look at objects provided by the teacher. You need to look at signs, vocabulary
items or pictures and be able to change quickly so you are looking again at the people in the class or someone you are talking to.
This really helps you be present in the class. And because it is Second Life it also means that you can look round corners, up in
the sky and even through walls! How do we do this?

• If you hold down the ‘ALT’ key at right of your keyboard you’ll see that your mouse arrow becomes a cross.
  Now you can focus on different objects by clicking on them and holding down the ‘ALT’ key. You can zoom in or out
  with the mouse wheel. This is great for reading anything in class, even writing that is very small.
• For even more control, hold down ‘CTRL’ and ‘ALT’ as well as your left mouse button. This will lock onto an object. As you move your mouse around, you can see it from any angle,
• Just move your avatar with the arrow keys to get back to a normal view.

• Click in the ‘advanced’ menu at the top of your screen and then click ‘Disable Camera Constraints’. Using the ALT and CTRL buttons while holding your left mouse key should let you zoom in on objects far away.

Now you can … Zoom in .. Zoom out .. Zoom in .. Zoom out.

Next week, I will be looking at how to use sound for learning English. Talk to you then.

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