Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Why not pick up some Spanish at Hacienda Segunda Vida?

Dr. Bixler introduces Gloria Clark!
Gloria Clark, an assistant professor at Harrisburg, prepared a proposal for her Seond Life Hacienda because of the difficulty she's seen in creating a foreign language environment in the classroom. She hoped to create a more immersive way to get students using Spanish.

Sounds like she's succeeded! Not only do her students speak Spanish in Second Life, they also complete written assignments related to their virtual experiences online. Gloria reports that the students in her course are doing a lot more writing in Spanish than in many other courses she's seen.

Along with the hacienda itself, she's also created a cathedral, La Casa Azul, and a beach. But even these aren't the whole course - she also takes her students on virtual field trips to "distant" Spanish-oriented Second Life locales. She seems to be quite amused at how closely students tend to identify with their SL avatars - some even collect pictures of "themselves" with SL landmarks.

Gloria has some wonderful anecdotes from her times with students in Second Life. One even involves poison candy! Check out Gloria's blog for some great highlights:
http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/gaming/blog/19

There are some minor obstacles, of course, such as a "smart board" (a sort of virtual blackboard) in SL that so far hasn't displayed Spanish punctuation or accent marks. All in all, though, it sounds like Second Life has proved to be a great tool for language instruction.

!Vamos a Second Life!
(I'm afraid that will have to do until I figure out how to get inverted exclamation points in this thing!)