If you're wanting something new & fun to explore check out Second life (SL), it's fantastic...(once you get your account). Through my avatar, 'sparker Wollongong' :-) I've been hooking up with my Irish friends back home & inspiring work colleague JoKay at her frozen retreat. I've been flying around 3d virtual worlds where all manner off human activity is happening, including education.
There are many educational possiblilties to utilise secondlife (SL), where to start! It is exciting to explore by fully immersiving oneself into the 3d world to learn as much as I can via Secondlife campus, Second life - How to wiki, Second life education wiki.
SL can be used in conjunction with other programmes, for instance I have also been experimenting with a gem of a programme I've come across called ComicLife (CL)...you can download a demo... it's not free but well worth the educational price. By first using SL to take the screenshots for the background of each comic scene, I have then created an instructional comic using ComicLife (CL).
In SL it's really easy to control camera angle of your view of the world and take screenshot's (saved as .png). In CL it's really quick and easy to create comic strips, choose your comic panel layout, drag your screenshots in, add caption with that cool comic type, voila! ... a flashy SL comic. You can even use ComicLife with photos.
Try SecondLife and ComicLife, with the richness of SL environments and engaging educational possibillties are apparent, the imagination is limitless for ways they can be applied in the classroom environment, some possibilities are....
- Create narrative/ learning resources with SL screenshots
- SL and CL together, storyboarding videos or SL movies (machinima)...
- In the classroom students take photos as part of a room task, put them into CL, create a comicstrip , they then have to plan stages of activity and how to communicate, great resource for all...
- Take it to the next stage you could upload your comic strip to Bubbleshare and bring in audio of the comic dialogue...
3 comments:
Hi Steven,
hope your enjoying the crack!
I've just become a second lifer and have only had one session in there. I agree with your comments about the ComicLife and its endless educational possiblities and the comic you created looks amazing.
Thanks tony, I'd like to try it out with students taking photographs of a task then their peers provide the comic strip dialogue explaining what they are doing. Could be fun.
I started doing Second Life comics late in 2007 (see http://stuffhappens.comicdish.com/index.php?pageID=42) though I didn't use Comic Life - rather I drew bits, used screenshots and put it together using PaintShopPro and Fireworks (for speech balloons etc). I knew I would be the first to make one, and considered it to be a version of fumetti,a comic that uses photos instead of drawings for imagery (which I've also done before).
The key factors in doing so with Second Life are being selective with choice of image, cropping, and especially processing that image so that gamma and contrast are optimum. Unprocessed snapshots from SL can suffer from a lack of real life attributes, such as no depth of field and a "sameness" between elements in the image. All of which can be corrected using a graphics editor, before importing the image into whatever you use to arrange them.
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