Releasing staff for training courses is a perennial problem for schools. Sparing teachers from the classroom can be difficult while the costs of hiring supply cover bites into the budget.
One local authority has turned to the virtual world to overcome the hurdles it faced when trying to recruit participants for a key training course on e-safety.
"If the teachers couldn't come to us then we had to find a way of coming to them, but it was impossible to get them all in one place," says Nick Speller, personalised learning consultant at Oxfordshire county council. "That was where Second Life came in."
Second Life is the web-based virtual world which enables users to interact via avatars. They can explore, meet each other and participate in individual and group activities. Its use in continuing professional development for teachers is still evolving.
"Second Life is an immersive 3D tool and learning environment, so it allows us to present things as we would if we were all in the room. We can take questions, show video clips and the participants can interact with each other but without all the time constraints and costs involved," Speller says.
"One of the good things about it is that we can organise sessions in the evening, so that they don't interfere with the school day. The courses are in areas such as cyber-bullying and producing the appropriate documentation and information and communication technology policies in schools, so it is important for teachers to attend."
Speller and his colleagues use only the basic features of Second Life, which include logging participants in, getting them to sit down and helping them to navigate around by steering the camera so they can look at the presentation. They will be outlining their experiences of using it at the Bett show (Olympia, London, 12–15 January 2011).
"We find Second Life to be quite quirky and it is known for being particularly good for role-play, though we aren't using it in that way at the moment. We expect to develop more creative uses for it as we go along," he adds. DL
