Marisa Constantinides – TEFL Matters

Language Teaching, Teacher Education & New Technologies

Making a Machinima in Second Life – in 19 Steps

Second Life, Tech Tools & Pedagogy Series January 14th, 2012

For the next few weeks I will be working and helping moderate the MachinEVO course in Second Life, one of the TESOL EVO courses. We are all hoping to learn how to record Second Life and to create recordings which will be useful to our language learners. There are already more than 110 participants on this course, some of them already accomplished machinima producers, and some taking their first steps now. 

Second life educators are known to be great sharers – nowhere else (but on Twitter)  have I met so many colleagues willing to give away their free time and this is an inspiring environment to work in.

For the benefit of those who have not yet created any machinima productions, I have created this short guide.

This post is inspired by a post with the title How to Make a Movie which summarises the process in 19 Steps.

Second Life

Download the Second Life Viewer and create your membership and avatar

Useful Tools for recording in Second Life

  •  Fraps free download from http://www.fraps.com/  You can record for up to 2 minutes – paid version (27$US) for as long as you want

Screencast tools – recording your screen

  •  Jing Free version allows recording your screen for up to five minutes. The screencasts can then be stored on their server and an embedding code is available.
  • Comment: Made a test recording and on my Mac which has a good internal microphone SL sounds recorded very well but in the past when I used it on my PC it didn’t.  Here is the link to my test recording,
  • Alternatives   Looks like there are quite a few – found them listed on this page. Do try them out and report your successes or comments

Audio Recording & Editing

  •  Audacity - an open source application which allows you to record and edit audion. Audacity is easy to use and allows you to record different tracks and to change the level or speed or tracks or sections of your track.
  • A You Tube Tutorial on how to record using Audacity and showing some of the basic functions. You can search for more on            You tube
  •    

 

©Marisa Constantinides 2012

 

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Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat!

Blog post, Second Life September 24th, 2011

Happy Birthday #ELTchat and all #ELTchat followers!

Free ClipArt from Microsoft

It’s been an amazing year and I am very proud and grateful to have been a part of this!

I look forward to many more birthdays and many more new directions that this great PLN will take me to!

Thank to all who follow and make my Wednesdays so charged with energy, revitalize my training and put me in touch with so many amazing educators!

What we have accomplished in this first year of #ELTchats! 

In this first year, we can boast about a few things and work harder to do more!

  • More than 100,000 tweets have appeared with the #ELTchat hastag, many of them posted outside #ELTchat times !
  • The widespread use of the hashtag for all important updates related goes to show that the #ELTchat hashtag has become an important and established tag to spread news to the ELT community on Twitter!
  • We were present and shared information at TESOL France in November 2010.
  • With the help and support of #ELTchat followers, bloggers and non-bloggers, we have turned www.elt.chat.com into a great resource bank of summaries which contain a wealth of ideas and links to keep up with your professional development
  • We created a wiki which contains all the transcripts of the chats. You can find it here and you can browse through all the transcripts
  • We created a number of podcasts which, however, due to the sudden illness and disappearance of @olafelch who was one of the original moderator and who did the sound, we have somewhat neglected! But we are coming on stronger with a great interview on Sunday! Stay tuned!!!
But over and above all, I think the most important thing is the Wednesday has become a day teachers look forward to, anticipating the opportunity to connect, share and learn from and with other teachers from around the world, with great excitement and the end of chats is always a time when all participants leave with a new burst of energy and inspiration to carry them through the difficult task of being a teacher.

IATEFL Glasgow 2011 

Our next project is to make #ELTchat better known to those who are still non-Twitter users, and many great teachers seem to hesitate about joining Twitter.

So all #ELTchat Moderators are going to be organising a Symposium and, hopefully, since at the time of writing these lines proposals have not yet been processed, all moderators, Shaun Wilden, Shelly Terrell, Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, Berni Hall and myself, will be presenting all about how #ELTchat can help you create a PLN and keep up with your professional development.
We hope to see some of you there!

Party Plans for next Wednesday 

Both #ELTchats next Wednesday will have an open topic which is to bring in and share the best ideas you got from participating or reading the summaries and briefly explain how you used the idea or tool and how it worked. Both chats promise to be great!
At the same time we are going to have a party in Second Life – for those of you who have experience of using Second Life,  have some virtual cake and drinks, music and a little bit of a celebration!

#ELTchat 1st Birthday Party Preparations in Second Life

 

Join us by clicking on this slurl and logging into Second Life and visiting my plot – yes, you read correctly, my plot – in Second Life,  or if you don’t have an account and the software, go to  http:/secondlife.com/, download the application (Second Life Viewer), create your avatar in minutes and join in the fun!

I look forward to seeing you there!!!!

Post Party Update

It was great to see quite a few #ELTchat friends and three more moderators joined me in Second Life for the birthday celebrations.  Shaun Wilden, Barbara Sakamoto, Shelly Terrell, Sue Lyon Jones, Lesley Cioccarelli, Adam Simpson, Alexandra Koukoumialou and Raquel Olivera were there and were also joined by Heike Philp – Gwen Gwasi in Second Life – one of the owners of Edunation where this happened. Heike, with her usual aplomb, very quickly opened her Adobe Connect Pro  classroom and made a recording of the last few minutes of this very happy gathering and the speeches we made, which is a lovely souvenir to have and we thank her very much for it.

Have a look at some of the snapshots which I turned into a short animoto production – the pretty party lights were a headache to delete and I am sorry that Barbara had to spend so much time figuring out how to lose them!!!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Speeches were made, virtual cake and champagne eaten and drunk, which some may think is a joke, a fake, not real… but to us it felt as if we were close to each other, even if thousands of miles apart, Barbara in Japan, Shaun and Sue in the UK, Heike in Germany,  Lesley in Australia, Shelly in the US and me in Greece….

Second Life does do that.

 

Here is the link to the video kindly recorded by Heike Philps in Edunation, where a lot of foreign language teaching and educational conferences and meetings take place.  Raquel Oliveira, Sue Lyon Jones, Shelly Terrell, Shaun Wilden and myself are sitting on the front ‘porch’ of my very own tree house in Second Life. :-)  (Yes, I am a proud Edunation Resident now…)

 

Related Post 

Marisa Constantinides Reflects on the 1st year of #ELTchat Interview on TEFLnet.com by Tara Benwell.

 

 

 

 

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Merry Christmas Wishes to my PLN!

Blog post, Second Life December 27th, 2010


…. and thank you notes to all those who affected my professional life in the past year

This has been an amazing year for this blog and this member of a strong and ever-widening PLN. My Christmas stocking is filled already with the gift of friendship of an amazing group of colleagues from the four corners of the globe but who I talk to every day!

Esra Girgin Akiskali, Amanda Wilson, Shelly Terrell, myself, Petra Pointner, Ozge Karaoglu & Vicky Saumel - photo from IATEFL Harrogate 2010

Esra Girgin Akiskali, Amanda Wilson, Shelly Terrell, myself, Petra Pointner, Ozge Karaoglu & Vicky Saumel at IATEFL Harrogate 2010

See what I mean? And these are just some of the people I have come to value and count as part of my daily professional life.

Here are my New Year’s Resolutions as stated in last year’s post;  in a word (cloud), ….

worlde

Made with wordle.net

Here is what I said and what happened (in a table; it wouldn’t be me if there wasn’t a table, would it now… :-) )

My 2010 Resolutions
Migration from DELTA website to a new DELTA wiki Mission accomplished! And three more wikis created in same year for our CELTA trainees, for our English language learners, for our Translation trainees… I have also been working on a wiki to help teachers’ associations use more technology, which I hope to be able to show on Associates day at IATEFL Brighton in 2011.
Find time to write my own materials Sad to say, didn’t even look for that kind of time!
Organize my centre more efficiently so I don’t have to be there all the time Mission more or less accomplished! I don’t actually have to be there, but it looks as if I am working all the time – that is something that still needs fixing.
Attend more conferences in person This was a good year – I attended and presented at our own local conference, TESOL Greece, then went to Istanbul to attend and present at ISTEK  Schools Conference. This was topped off with my first time at IATEFL International at Harrogate where I presented - both Istanbul and Harrogate were great occasions for meeting many friends who – so far – had only been Twitter friends!
Integrate technology into my teacher training courses It’s happening, but taking a lot more time than I thought it would, especially with younger trainees, the so-called digital natives (in the Prenskyan sense of the word). Some of them have proved to be less native than expected with much more resistance to innovation and change; this is, in fact, one of the topics I am going to be talking about at IATEFL Brighton in 2011
Teach in Second Life Am now officially a resident with my own plot where I can run courses – have presented in Second life and am, hopefully, also going to be involved in the TESOL EVO course for Teaching in Virtual Worlds.
Online presentation skills Somewhat improved: I had the opportunity to present a few times online, as you see on my Presentations page - even in Second Life, which is a different set up completely and where my presentation skills were, more recently, put to the test.
Watercolour paintings or music composed? ? Not a single watercolour created; I listened to a lot of music but not a single tune or even  short jingle were created this past year. Bad year for the arts!
Writing blog posts more frequently. Unfortunately, I have not turned out to be a prolific blogger, like some of the friends I admire who churn them out at the drop of a link! But I am very happy to have had two articles accepted by two major publications. One was co-authored with Sara Hannam and will be appearing in a special manual to be published by IATEFL (”  Running an Association for Language Teachers”) and the other one will be published in a special edition of the  International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT).

There are many other special moments I want to thank my PLN for:

Presenting online -  I want to send special thanks to Shelly Terrell who is responsible for so much of my online involvement and who keeps inviting me to these amazing online events! I had the pleasure of meeting Shelly in person at ISTEK and Harrogate but was also fortunate to have her as my CELTA trainee this past August – she is one amazing bundle of energy and joy to the people around her but having watched her closely for the four weeks of the course, I have to let you in on the secret: she is a very very very very very hard worker – her success is the result of many hours of dedicated work and I wish her every success and joy in her personal and professional life.  Thank you so much Shelly and thank you for your gift of friendship.

Meeting my Twitter PLN – Special thanks to Burcu Akyol for inviting me to ISTEK Schools Conference and giving me the first and very memorable opportunity to meet my Twitter PLN in person – and to watch her in action! She is one phenomenal organizer!

Participating in an EU project – Special thanks to Shelly Terrell for suggesting my institution and Joel Josephson for including me in – soon (in early January) I shall be meeting with all the partners in Barcelona.

Getting involved in learning and writing about technology and pedagogy – special thanks to some of the great educators in my PLN, Nik Peachey first of all and his great tweets and blog posts here and here - more special thanks to Nik for his very great kindness in including me (!!! I still feel total astonishment at this – so do quite a few others, I believe ;-) )  in this very special post with the wow title: Let us now praise famous women That felt so fabulous – thanks, Nik!

Many thanks also to Graham Stanley for encouraging me and supporting me in writing an article for the International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT).  Since my M.A. I hadn’t really done academic writing of this sort and writing for a refereed journal was a new and extremely valuable experience!

Being invited to work on the TESOL EVO (more on this soon) – my special thanks must go to Heike Philps, a very special person, who insists that I can do it! Well, what else can I do but try? More special thanks to Heike for inviting me to both recent Virtual Round Table Conferences  first and second as well as to be a panel member for the opening plenary at the Slanguages 2010 conference - Heike is now my neighbour in Second Life and I am hopeful we will be doing more together soon!

Jeremy Harmer, Shelly Terrell, Carol Rainbow, myself and Tamas Lorincz at IATEFL Harrogate 2010

Jeremy Harmer, Shelly Terrell, Carol Rainbow, myself & Tamas Lorincz at IATEFL Harrogate 2010

But my thanks must go to one more special friend, Carol Rainbow, my Second Life dear friend who drove all the way to Harrogate to see us for one day! She is so special, especially because in this world of blowing one’s own trumpet she remains one of the most (unjustifiably) modest people I know.

Thanks to her and all the members of my PLN, this has been a most amazing year for me and for this blog.  There are so many, I can’t even begin to think how each one has sent me an idea, inspired by a tweet or a link.

My very special Christmas Season wishes must go to all my trainees in the past year (and years before!). Although they don’t perhaps realize it, they are also a very important part of my PLN. They learn from me but I learn from them, with them and for them all the time!

Last but not least, I must mention the joy of moderating #ELTchat every Wednesday. I will be writing a separate blog post about it but the conversations with all those members of my PLN who have joined in the online discussions and those who have agreed to be interviewed, Jeremy Harmer (UK) , Janet Bianchini (UK living in Italy), Graham Stanley (UK living in Spain), Beya Yilmaz (Turkey), Simon Greenall (UK) and Vicky Loras (Greek-Canadian living in Switzerland) – thank you all for connecting with us on #ELTchat.

Thank you all for visiting and reading these lines which means my voice is heard and ideas spread. And if they are worth spreading, they will stay with some of you long enough to create some small inspiration and a desire for change.

Happy Christmas Wishes and all the Best for 2011

Related Blog Post

Bridget Jones and my New Year’s Resolutions – 2009

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My Teaching Languages in a Virtual World Blog Posts

Article, Second Life, Tech Tools & Pedagogy Series July 24th, 2010

Since the  Teaching Languages in a Virtual World Ning will soon be closing down, I have saved the posts related to some teaching experiences in Second Life here on this blog – mainly for the memory and some really interesting discussions following each post.

ning

You will be able to read them by downloading the pdf copy which I have uploaded into by materials box from box.net

All the rest of the resources of this ning have now been moved to a wiki here.

I have saved the posts, not because I think they are all that significant, but they do remind me of that great course which I encourage you to follow next year.

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