Second Life: Interactive Professional Development

Second Life: Interactive Professional Development - "Many educators, over the past couple of years, have had the chance to participate in a number of online synchronous professional development sessions, commonly called Webinars. Vendors often give product walk-through presentations using the WebEx online conferencing program. The International Society for Technology in Education presents professional development sessions using Adobe Connect, another Web-based presentation software. Other districts and educational agencies choose Elluminate as their presentation platform. Each of these products has similar components—they allow the participants to view a presentation, chat in a chat window to ask questions or make a comment, create polls to collect data from the participants in real-time, and sometimes even allow the use of a microphone in addition to a chat window. Usually, the sessions are recorded and archived so participants can go back and review the presentation or share it with others in their professional learning community.

"Second Life, a Multi-user Virtual Environment, takes this type of interactive online professional development one step further. In this environment participants log in to a virtual world and are represented by their virtual persona, or “avatar,” which they created earlier. I have observed in lab settings many teachers using this type of environment to enhance their professional practice, and see how truly engaging and educationally sound it is."