Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life

It has been very interesting and something learning about Second Life in the past few courses. In our first course, my group and I found it very difficult to navigate and frustrating to use. The assigned places we discovered did not relate to my music curriculum and the only location I could find that dealt with music was a concert hall that played a recording at noon everyday. This did not excite me because, first off I do not teach at noon and it is no different than me playing a recording for my students.

One the teachers in my group was a social studies teacher who had just finished a unit on Egypt. She had all of her students create avatars and visit the Egyptian museum. She had great success with this, telling us her student made numerous connections with knowledge they learned in class and the activities in Second Life.

http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/392/456

I have found some research that discusses inspiring students to learn about Classical Music in Second Life. David T Schwartz of the Music Academy Online talks about their new virtual world in Second Life. Between the Music Academy Online and Disney they have created a virtual world to inspire the exploration of Classical Music.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Utwig/60/80/36

I went to the Music Academy’s place in Second Life and was highly disappointed with what I found. They have a building for each era of classical music, which sounds like a good idea, but the architecture is off for some of the buildings. There were many pictures of artwork created in this time, which is great for students to know, but I found no useful information about the music. There were many places to buy things but I did not click on those. Some of the artwork had links to website, but they are not meant for middle school or high school students. The few I clicked on were doctoral papers on the era’s music. Also, there is no sound for any of the buildings. The last place I visited was this lounge, which was the teleporting center, and I found this to be very inappropriate for students. They offer you coffee, which is a nice gesture, but they also offer you vodka on the rocks and a vodka martini.

I would not use this site with my students. There is not enough relevant information on music history to warrant the exploration. This site is not as closely monitored as Quest Atlantis, so I was say it might be unsafe for students to explore. Also, I find it very hard to navigate this world.