Second Life ™

A bunch of us are enjoying Geekie Kidd presenting on photos, editing tools, and photo toys. Stay tuned for more!
posted by Laelia Laval on Eduisland II using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

OMG!  Can you repeat after me? ‘M’…’A'…’Y'…that’s right!  It’s going to be MAY in two (2) days!  Where did the winter go?LOL  Not that I’m looking for it!  Though in SL, the weather is always just perfect.  Anyway, get your calendars out, get the pen ready, turn on your PDA, sync the info to your computer, I don’t really care how you do it, but get these dates down!

DATE:  May 7, 2008

‘STARS Shine Bright!’ presented by Peyton Merlin, Thonalon Umarov, Faythe Fouroux  and Southern Georgia

DESCRIPTION:  DEN STARS will be sharing favorite tips, tricks, sites and more. Come learn from our STARS. As you know, ” we are our best resource” !  Do you have something to share? Let us know!
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DATE:  May 14, 2008

‘Stay Tuned & Stay Connected’ (that’s my motto…thought I’d throw that in while waiting to hear back from Hall on the title, figured that regardless, the title would be appropriate to anything Hall will present!LOL) presented by Hall Davidson

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DATE:  May 21, 2008

‘So You Want to Be a STAR?’ presented by Riptide Furse
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DATE:  May 28, 2008

‘Trivia Spring Training’ presented by Riptide Furse

As always all times are 5 p.m. SLT (8 p.m. EST)

You too can join the DEN in SL Den Guide program! As you can tell, the work isn’t all that difficult (thx Unklar for modeling!LOL). You meet, greet, and answer any questions that visitors may have. It’s a great way to hone your SL skills as well. Contact Beth Kohnke in-world.
posted by Laelia Laval on Eduisland II using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Don’t forget to join us this Wednesday at 5 p.m. SLT (8 p.m. EST) for another fabulous workshop!  This week it’s  ‘Get Creative with Images! Online Photo Editing for Education and Fun!’ presented by Geekie Kidd (Charlene Chausis - RL).  Geekie will share ideas for editing, annotating and/or enhancing digital photos — either from your camera, or from the
thousands of images available at Discovery Streaming! We will explore free web tools such as Flickr Toys, Picnik, Phixr, and Scrapblog.

Don’t forget to bring your virtual camera and ideas to this workshop!

Workshop will be held at the sandbox outside of the DEN HQs.

This one is literally ‘hot off the presses’.  Just logged out of a very informative session with Celestia on using VoiceThread, converted my snapshots, uploaded them to Flickr….and here we are!

If you were unable to attend tonight’s session, please make sure to visit ‘Things I Can Do in the Second Life World but Cannot Do in Real Life’ VoiceThread created especially for tonight’s session.  Please feel free to add your own audio or text comment.

Jarvis shared some webpages he’s compiled on VoiceThread and they can be found at Technology Learning Center and a wiki, web20ols.

I just wanted to add that there is ONE thing that you can do in SL that you CANNOT do in RL and that is drastically alter your appearance as is shown by our ‘esteemed’ Chair, Riptide Furse.  Can you say, ‘ouuuu, ouuuu, ouu’? (monkey-speak for ‘DEN in SL Rocks!’) LOL

Don’t forget!  Cel is presenting at DEN in SL tomorrow evening on VoiceThread.  In order to make full use of this wonderful opportunity, please make certain that you sign up for a *FREE* VoiceThread account.  If you have used VoiceThread in the past, did you know that for a mere$10 (less than 2 grande lattes at your favorite java place) you can get an Educator’s Pro account?  You might want to check that out while you’re on the website.  You’ll need to use a school e-mail account for this.

Don’t forget to join us, this Wednesday at 5 p.m. SLT (8 p.m. EST) for another in our series of Wednesday Workshops with Celestia Cazelet, entitled ‘Work With Me Here!’.   VoiceThread is a free Web 2.0 tool with so many uses. Join us for this workshop where we will discover how to use it in our classroom, in our personal learning network, and in our personal lives. Experienced and inexperienced VT users are welcome, as Celestia will hold to her usual style and welcome audience members to share their tips and ideas!

Hope to see everyone there!

A dozen folks showed up for JuliaAnn Mill’s Wednesday Workshop on PhotoStory3.  The presenter had a couple of issues, some of which were resolved and others weren’t.  First, JuliaAnn was unable to ’see’ people in-world in their entirety, but this I mean that all avis were apparently ‘beheaded’ (yup, our heads were in our laps) and our bodies were slashed (think of a Stephen King scarecrow).  No amount of tweaking and relogging solved the problem.  Then there were issues with scratchy voice and unable to get back in-world once logged out.  Luckily both of those latter issues were easily resolved.  While we were waiting for JuliaAnn to make her appearance I whittled away the time by leading all present in a meditation session (heh, anything to avoid those Star Wars jokes! LOL).  You should have seen everyone repeating ‘ummmmm’ after me!  Things got a little out of hand near the end when someone (was that you, Thon?) decided to demonstrate his Aflac gesture!  Yes, that’s right, you had to be there to hear him screech ‘AFLAC’ at the top of his lungs!

JuliaAnn very deftly managed to guide us back to the presentation at hand — PhotoStory 3.  Although I’m familiar with the application she did share some things I was not aware of: 1.  You can upload your finished product to a site like Zamzar, convert it to .mov which will then allow the show to be played on an iPod; 2.  you can create a slide in PowerPoint, save it as a jpeg and import it to PhotoStory3; and 3. not only can you narrate each slide, but the show won’t continue until the narration for a particular slide is done.  Please check out her PowerPoint and shownotes at the Google Groups.

Here’s a challenge to those who were in attendance (and even those who weren’t):  Create a PhotoStory3 and share the link to it in the comments section below.  Please NO KIDS in the show!  (Don’t want to have to deal with release forms and such.)  This is a good way to apply and share what you learned during the Wednesday Workshop.  In fact, I’m thinking of having this as a feature for those workshops which lend themselves to creating and sharing.

Thanks again JuliaAnn for doing a FABULOUS job!  And as aside, did you know that if you present for the DEN in SL that that counts as an ‘event’ in RL?????  Got an idea?  Want to give it a whirl?  Just contact one of the LC members and we’ll get you set up.

The DEN in SL is looking for a few STARS to share a resource on Wed.
May 7th at 5 PM SLT. This resource can be something you love to use
within Discovery Streaming, a great Web 2.0 tool, an activity, a tip
or trick or link. Please contact one of the DEN in SL LC if you can
share that evening.

We want our STARS to help brighten our way!!
Remember if you present at this event it can count toward maintaining your STAR status and toward the free water bottle during Spring Training program.
Still not sure? Maybe this will help get you started.

• Think of some web sites, cool tech toys, or a project you worked on this year.
• Create 4-5 slides in Keynote, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, etc.
• Save the slides out as jpg files.
• Contact Lor, Beth, Riptide or any of the LC members and we will help get your pictures uploaded to SL and pay you for your costs of uploading.

You can choose to present your slides via voice if you have a headset or by text chat.

You can contact Lor Fredricksson and let her know you want to give it go or leave us a comment.

Here’s a new category of posts — ‘Mish-Mash’!  I’ll be sharing a bunch of snippets of items and thoughts, none of which would warrant their own post.

So…welcome to the first ‘Mish-Mash’!

For those of you who are Torley video fans, and for those of you who haven’t a clue who Torley is (though you soon will!), let me share a link to his Torley’s Videos page.   You’ll quickly understand why Torley has a penchant for watermelon and you will just as quickly look beyond the color combination and delve into the myriad of S/L help videos Torley has made.  Want to go back to the place you teleported to an hour ago?  Then you’ll want to check out Torley’s video on ‘Teleport Location History’.  Most videos are under 2 minutes in length which in my opinion is the perfect length — anything longer and my mind is wandering.

A shout-out to Cal for presenting on Moodle at our Wednesday Workshop.  We had quite a turn-out for the presentation and many thanks to Cal for doing such a fantastic job.  Cal’s slideshow is available here or you can find it in the ^Files^ section of the Google Groups.  You can also find a transcript of the chat in the ^Files^ section of Google Groups as well.

And of course, a shout-out to Unklar Klaar for entertaining us before the workshop with his Star Wars jokes and to Laural McCallen for egging him on!

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve added to a Blogroll along the right hand side.  I’ll be adding more S/L related blogs and if you have any you would like to suggest, please leave a comment below.

Gentle Reminder — This Wednesday, April 16th, JuliaAnn Mills will be doing a workshop on ‘PhotoStory - Making Movies’.  This presentation is a spin-off from RL Joe Brennan’s January session on Makin’ Movies.  The focus will be on how to put together a movie using digital images, adding audio, background music, and text.  You will also view a finished movie that was converted to a QuickTime movie for viewing on a media player in Second Life to use for professional development.  See everyone there at 5 p.m. SLT (8 p.m. EST).