Dates 

Syllabus

Week 1

10 Jan - 16 Jan 

Live Session 1

Venue: Zoom welcome session touring our venues via screensharing

Heike Philp and Randall Sadler

Building in VWs and VR - what’s the difference? What prior knowledge is needed? 

How difficult is building in virtual worlds? How difficult is building in VR?

Live Session 2

Venue: Immersive experience in OpenSim and in Zoom for those who can not join

Helen Myers, Alicja Bomirska, Dennis Newson

Let’s build a community building / inworld meeting place (OS)

Week 2

17 Jan - 23 Jan 

Live Session 1

Venue: Zoom session sharing screen to show what to do

Helena Galani

Building objects; adding texture, sound/media and script to objects; animesh (OS)

Live Session 2

Jennifer Hamilton

Venue: Zoom and framevr.io

How to build using MS 3D Paint and import this in to framevr.io (VR) 

Week 3

24 Jan - 30 Jan

Live Session 1

Venue: Immersive experience in OpenSim and in Zoom for those who can not join

Dr. Doris Molero aka Pionia Destiny

Importing 3D objects and create Mesh objects (OS)

Live Session 2

Venue: Immersive experience in Second Life and in Zoom for those who can not join

Dr. Randall Sadler

How to build experiences in Second Life  (SL)

Week 4

31 Jan - 6 Feb

Live Session 1

Venue: Immersive experience in Engage and Altspace and in Zoom for those who can not join

Michael McDonald

Creating scenes in Mozilla Hubs

Live Session 2

Amany Alkhayat

Creating scenes in  Altspace VR (VR)

Week 5

7 Feb - 13 Feb

Live Session 1

Barbara McQueen

Venue: Immersive experience in OpenSim and in Zoom for those who can not join

Speed building challenge! Win a virtual hard hat

Join this session!

The action starts on Jan 9th, 2021.

1. Use this link to register to our session: 

https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/YEMWJK

2. Create an account in Canvas. 

Name (last, first)

Biodata (not more than 50 words)

Randall Sadler [aka Randall Renoir] is Associate professor at  Illinois University, head of the Virtual Worlds SIG of CALICO. He is a TESOL member and co-owner of EduNation islands in Second Life. Book author of ‘Virtual Worlds for Language Learning: From Theory to Practice (Telecollaboration in Education)’, Randall Sadler, published by Peter Lang AG, Switzerland, Dressman, M., & Sadler, R. (Eds). (2020). The Handbook of Informal Language Learning. Malden, MA.: Wiley-Blackwell, Nurmukhamedov, U. & Sadler, R. (Eds.) (2020). New Ways in Teaching with Games. Alexandria, VA: TESOL. Press

Dr. Randall Sadler

rsadler [at] illinois [dot] edu 

USA

Heike Philp [Gwen Gwasi] is CEO of let's talk online sprl, a technology support provider for language learning and events in real-time. She is co-initiator of EU funded LANCELOT (virtual classroom) and AVALON (virtual world) and the CAMELOT project (machinima for language teachers). She is founder of the Virtual Round Table Conference and co-owns EduNation in Second Life. 

Heike Philp 

heikephilp [at] gmail [dot] com

Belgium

Dennis Newson [Osnacantab Nesterov] M.A. (Cantab), P.D.E.S.L (Leeds), taught EFL in Africa, Arabia, Norway, and Germany in middle schools, secondary schools, teacher training colleges, a technical university, and an arts university. He was consultant for short periods in Bosnia and Kosovo, and conferences have taken him to Poland, Hungary, Las Palmas, Russia, and England. He has developed his interest in SL since his alleged retirement.   In Second Life he is known as Osnacantab Nesterov.  

Dennis Newson

djn [at] dennisnewson [dot] de

Germany

Helena Galani [ErlinaAzure in SL] holds an R.S.A. Diploma, M.A. ELT (Applied Linguistics), and certification in teacher training and advanced ICT skills.

As accredited TESOL/EAP educator, tutor and online course creator, Helena has been blending and flipping her classes in Virtual Worlds. She has also taught EAP (University of Nottingham), and EFL training teachers for INDIRE on edMondo. As moderator during EVO ViLLAGE & vLanguages, Helena presented on the usefulness of designing games, Interactive Scenarios and Transmedia Storytelling experiences in VWs for ELT/EAP.  As EduNation resident and CAMELOT Award winner in 2015, Helena supports the educational value of VWs through learner and teacher machinima. At Conventions, she highlights different aspects on the value of 3D VWs and machinima in language teaching. With her classes, Helena also implements Transmedia narrative to bring educational material to life in OS, SL and VR applications. 

Helena Galani

helenagalani2010 [at] gmail [dot] com   agogepaedeia.com 

Greece

Barbara McQueen [aka Barbara Novelli] has an M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. She has been an accomplished builder and teacher in Second Life and Open Sim for more than a decade. This includes building two mega worlds in Kitely for teaching English: Edutopia I and Edutopia 2. She has also been contracted by private companies to build additional objects, buildings, and conference sites, and she has created over 500 products available on the Kitely Marketplace. As the owner of SLESL.net, she continues to develop a wide range of virtual ESL courses that make use of situational role-playing, games, mysteries, machinimas, and special events. During her career, she has taught ESL students and instructors on five continents, and has been a conference presenter for TESOL, VWBPE, SLanguages, and MachinEVO.

bmcqueen2 [at] gmail [dot] com

Alicja Bomirska,M.A. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, has been a teacher of English for nearly 30 years. She has successfully completed numerous TEFL courses, many of them on ICT and VR Immersive Language Learning. She has been involved in many projects and currently is cooperating with an Italian school on an E-twinning project where the use of the virtual environment is essential.

Alicja Bomirska 

alicja258 [at] poczta [dot] onet [dot] pl 

Poland

Helen Myers [Karelia Kondor] is a teacher of French and a manager at a large UK secondary school and chair of the London branch of ALL (Association of Language Learning) and its former president.  She is an active member of the MachinEVO group, SLexperiements and a longstanding EduNation resident and she is helping to set up a private SL island for teenagers with SEGfL and the British Computer Society. Her blogcontains information about her SL activities, which include weekly English pronunciation classes open to all.  For examples of her video work, go to her YouTube channel. 

Karelia Kondor 

Helen Myers

helenmyers007 [at] gmail [dot] com

Dr. Doris Molero (Ed.D) a.k.a Pionia Destiny is passionate about language learning, instructional design, and related educational technologies, specifically 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments for situated, experiential learning.  She has been involved in virtual worlds since 2007 after been invited to join Webheads in Action for EVO Village. She has been part of different communities of practice as an organizer, presenter, or volunteer in VWBPE, Camelot project, Edunation, NANEC, Virtual Pioneers, INDIRE on edMondo, SLMOOC, and VWMOOC. Roleplaying in virtual worlds taught her about creating and telling stories in communities as Avilion, Sylvhara, and Artstonia.  She has had the chance to work on different projects with her students. Her latest adventure is a Transmedia Storytelling language learning series called Virtually Anywhere.

http://pioniadestiny.blogspot.com

Dr. Doris Molero

doris3m [at] gmail [dot] com

Venezuela

Amany Alkhayat is a doctoral student in the Instructional Technology and Media program, TC Columbia University. She earned her first MA in TEFL from the American University in Cairo and her second MA from the Instructional Technology and Media program, TC Columbia University. She's the founder and chair of the Technology Enhanced Language Learning SIG at NYS TESOL, USA. She's a Udemy instructor teaching more than 5K students. She’s also the CEO of Linguatech Inc and Speekit learning app. Her research interests are focused on Technology in the classroom, designing technology assisted learning/intervention, using conversational agents/chatbots in the EFL/ESL Classroom, and Digital Storytelling. Her 2017 book chapter is in the edited volume, Teaching English Reflectively with Technology, by Dr. Hubbard and Dr. Ioannou-Georgiou and entitled Exploring the Effectiveness of Using Chatbots in the EFL Classroom. In 2017, She self-published a Kindle ebook, Become a Tech Savvy Teacher: A Comprehensive Guide to Using Technology and Improving Students’ Scores.  

Amany Alkhayat

aa4396 [at] tc.columbia [dot] edu

Jennifer Hamilton

Jennifer Hamilton [Jaz Beverly] has a Masters in Library in Information Science and is Head of Instruction and an Assistant Professor at the Dupré Library, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Jen first became active in virtual worlds in 2008 in graduate school, when she interned in Second Life at the still active nine-branch public library system in Caledon.  She was a teacher-trainee in the GUINEVERE project, and has just launched a pilot virtual world for library education in Kitely.

jennifer [dot] hamilton [at] louisiana [dot] edu US

Co-moderator

Michael McDonald After a combined 20 years of studying and teaching foreign languages, MichaelMcDonald set up the Gold Lotus consultancy in Italy to support students accelerate their English language-learning potential and cultural awareness by using virtual reality. Michael is working on a number of projects relating to English-language learning in VR, and collaborates with universities in Europe to research how immersive tasks can support the language learner or teacher.  The past year saw him launch Handy English which is a VR handtracking app to build vocabulary, run a consecutive 24-hour VR English lesson to raise money for the fight against Covid and launch a program in an Italian secondary school which supports students and teachers build their English skills in VR while connecting them to other students globally in a virtual cultural-linguistic exchange program. 

contact [at] goldlotus [dot] co  (not com, only co :)  Italy