August 2007 — News
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The Teen Grid: Bringing Your School into Second Life
Second Life, which offers an virtual world complete with avatars to represent human visitors, has intrigued some educators. The popular graphical online world, with land, commerce, buildings, and social networking, seems to offer educational potential, but how to get started?
Teachers, media specialists, and others who want to explore the learning potential of Second Life in the classroom might benefit from a conversation with Peggy Sheehy, library media specialist at Suffern Middle School, a high-performing school in Suffern, NY, about 30 miles northwest of New York City.
Sheehy is the originator of Ramapo Islands, Suffern Middle School's presence in the Teen Grid area of Second Life. Suffern has maintained a private learning environment there since August 2006. Teachers who want help developing curricula for Second Life, help convincing administrators of the benefits of the virtual world, or simply an understanding of how to get started, might benefit from Sheehy's experience.
At Suffern, 800 students and 15 eighth-grade teachers participated in Second Life this year, with projects that covered subjects ranging from math to family consumer science to art, health, and social studies.
Middle Schoolers in Second Life
Suffern began the Second Life project late in 2006, after Sheehy became convinced of its educational potential, spent six months on a proposal, got administrative buyin, then purchased virtual "land" from Second Life at an educational discount. She then developed Ramapo Islands, which is located within an age-restricted area of Second Life called the Teen Grid. To protect visitors, users of the Teen Grid must be between the ages of 13 and 17. Suffern students can visit only the private estate that is Ramapo Islands; they cannot enter the Teen Grid at large or communicate with anyone outside it. For further safety, any adult allowed in the Suffern area, Sheehy said, has passed an FBI background check.
Suffern teachers, working with Sheehy, are integrating Second Life into the curriculum in a variety of ways. For example, in working with an eighth-grade English teacher who was teaching John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Sheehy brought students into Second Life to conduct a mock trial. "They did research on the American judicial system; they took on roles and then responded according to an assigned characters from the book.... They were so much more invested in the book, and they came away with such a richer experience."
Although the courtroom scenes could have been conducted in the classroom, Sheehy said she thinks that staging it in Second Life engaged the students more. She said she finds that the level of discourse in the virtual world is somehow often richer than in a classroom. Group identities often fall away; fashion is unimportant, since everyone is represented by an avatar they created themselves; and students tend to be more honest in their comments, Sheehy said.
