Yet another Digital Story/Slideshow on Second Life.
I’ll be using this one as part of a CD-rom I’ve put together for the TAFE NSW Helping Young People at Risk (HYPAR) program.
Yet again, I’ve used the assets to create multiple versions. See a Slideshare version and a Flickr version too! 
Sean and I have been working on a collection of Newbie Tips for users who are new to Second Life. This is an important resource for many of our participants at workshops and presentations in-world, as it takes some users a bit of time and effort to make sense of the Second Life User Interface.
So, in the interest of creating better resources, I’ve finally finished a new collection of slides, which covers more of the important skills, and decided to make a little digital story out of it. Check it out below.
This is an example of one way that Second Life can be used to generate multimedia resources. It’s a little simpler that machinima, but still lots of fun.
The process for making these digi stories is pretty easy:
Step 1. Collect some snapshots in Second Life which illustrate the points you’d like to make in your digital story.
Step 2. Edit the images with your favourite image editing tool. In this case I used Photoshop, but you could also use The Gimp or Picasa.
Step 3. Put together your slide sequence. There are a range of tools you can use for that – I used Photoshop Elements 5 in this case…. But there’s a great list of software for digital story making on the Digitales Wiki which provides some good options. You could even do this with an online tool like Jumpcut!
Step 4. Record your audio and choose some background music. I used the inbuilt tools in Photoshop Elements 5 to record my narration. It was simple and quick and allows me to add new slides later if I want to without too much trouble. However Audacity is a great for recording and mixing your audio too.
Step 5. Compress if you can – I use Sorenson Squeeze to optimize my videos for sharing online. Another great option for compressing videos and digital stories is Super. Compresing is especially important if you also want to use your video on a videoplayer in Second Life, where you will need it in .Mov format and uploaded to a server.
That’s it – digital story complete using Second Life as the platform to generate the raw artwork.
And the great thing is, the assets I’ve created can be used in other ways as well. I’ve uploaded the images I created to Flickr to create a Photoset and Slideshow, and I’ve also dropped those images into a Powerpoint Presentation and uploaded it to Slideshare here. I’ve also uploaded the slides to Second Life, so users can view them at our Virtual Meeting Space. Teleport here to check it out.
Lots of different formats for all sorts of users to access….. Come to think of it, I could even use Super to create a version to send to someone’s mobile phone!
Many weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hanging out in Second Life with Kerry Johnson from education.au, whilst she interviewed me for a podcast which has just been published in their E-learning Insights Blog.
Check out E-learning Insights – Episode 9: Second Life as an educational tool.
The podcast also includes the fabulous Lindy McKeown aka Decka Mah, who gives an overview of her work in Second Life, and the action learning strategies she is using; along with some info from me on the work that Sean and I have been doing in Second Life.
Sean and I had the pleasure of presenting some workshops at the HYPAR Hands-On Workshop last Friday.
For those who don’t know ‘TAFE-speak’, the HYPAR program is a focussed on working with young people aged 15 to 19, and is designed to help the most disadvantaged young people in the community to engage in education and build pathways to further education or employment. For further info about HYPAR, check out their Hyparpaedia on Wikispaces or visit the EngageMe website.
Anyway, during the presentation, we provided an overview of some of the educational uses of Second Life, showed some videos, talked about both the Teen and Adult Grids and attempted to get everyone in world for a bit of an explore.
Despite some technical difficulties, I think most participants got an idea of how Second Life could be used. It was definitely exciting for us to hear how teachers working with youth at risk from a range of subject areas including construction, IT, communications, general education and many more are contemplating using virtual worlds with their students.
You can download the workshop material below:
You may also be interested in some of the online resources we shared during the workshop including:
We didn’t manage to get to all of them – but some of the places and spaces we recommended to participants included:
And I still can’t resist this video as a good overview of Second Life (you gotta love ‘the voice’!)
Our next online event is coming up – check out the E-Learning Network’s Online Conference website for more info!