Filming in Second Life 1

Last Sunday, I was lucky enough to make my debut as an educational chat show host on The Consultants-E's Edunation Island where I interviewed Gavin Dudeney. In an attempt to capture this moment in my personal history I decided to video record the event with the intention of editing it into a kind of 'highlights of' show.

Since I posted the first clip from this on my Quick Shout blog, I've had a number of people asking me how I recorded it and what I used, so I've decided to share what I've learned so far from creating movies in Second Life and have a think about how this could be put to use with our students. Anyway, in this article I'll start with the technology bit and how the clip above was created.

Hardware and Software

• My initial worry was that grabbing an hour of video and running my avatar and being the host of the show all from one computer was asking for trouble, so I decided to use two computers (both MACs) and run my avatar on one and record the video on the other.
• I used a MAC to record the video and some screen recording software called I-Show-U (it's not free, but it's not expensive either). The software uses a plugin called Sound Flower which enables me to record the audio coming into the computer. I've also had some success doing this on a PC with Camtasia Studio 5.
  

• Another advantage of using a separate computer to do the recording on is that when I've tried to do it before with just one, my microphone comes out much louder than the speakers coming through the computer. Most good screen recording software should have an option to record the in-coming audio from the computer, so make sure you have this option selected.

Setting up the Second Life Interface
It's important to set up the interface on the computer that you are recording on so that you get the best quality sound and minimise distraction, so ...

• On the sound controls I muted any of the unwanted sounds that i didn't want in the recording

• I also edited my preferences to make sure that there were as few on screen distractions as possible. I turned off the avatar name tags and disabled popup messages etc.

• As I was planning to go into mouse look to zoom in on the action from the back of the hall, I made sure that audio for voice chat was set to 'Hear Voice chat from camera position'.
• I reduced the frame size of the Second Life viewer, to make it a bit closer to the final output size I wanted, as I thought this would reduce the final file size and save on quality loss when the video was edited.
  

Editing Software
Once the recording was over I was left with a 1 hour / 253Mb .MOV file. To edit the file I used the free I-Movie software that came with my MAC. This was the first time I'd used it and I found it pretty easy to learn.

• One of the really great things about it is that when I save the movie I can load it directly up to my my YouTube channel in a single click.
• For those of you not blessed with a MAC Camtasia Studio 5 (which I've used for most of the SL tutorials I've created) enables you to do all the editing from within the software, so PC users don't need a separate software, though Camtasia Studio 5 isn't free (I think Camtasia Studio 3 free is though)
  

Well you've seen the results above, though the .MOV file quality is much better (but slower and larger than the YouTube version).

So What Went Wrong
As with all best made plans, plenty of things went wrong:

• The biggest problem was with avatars appearing in the centre of the coffee table during the interview! Kind of hard to know how to prevent this kind of thing.

• Also of course if you leave a computer idle for long enough, even though it's recording it can start to hibernate, or a screen saver can appear! So worth changing those energy saving settings.
• And of course how ever many of those popup messages you disable there's always one you miss!
  

Anyway, I hope after trying this I'm a bit wiser and next time it will go a lot smoother.
If you have any experience of creating film from Second Life, by all means leave a comment. Or if you think I've made any big mistakes omissions here, by all means try to put me right,

Look forward to your comments and in part two of this article I'll be looking at ways to exploit filming with students.

Related links:

• Killer Apps in Second Life
• Coffee With Gavin Dudeney in Second Life
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Building in Second Life
• More Second Life Tutorials
• Lip Sync for Second Life
• Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life

Best

Nik Peachey

Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey

Teaching Speaking in Second Life

For me, one of the main blocks to really developing online language learning courses has been the inability to supply real communicative speaking practice. VOIP software like Skype has certainly pushed the bounds of what is possible, as has the development of more effective web based video conferencing platforms, but in my opinion the biggest step towards making this possible has been the developments made in virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life which not only enable the use of voice, but can also help students to develop an understanding gesture and spatial relationships while speaking.

For anyone interested in giving it a try, here are four basic tutorial videos to help you get started with how voice works in Second Life and how you can use it for pair and group work.

Setting up voice
This video shows you how to activate the voice client and make sure that the quality of your sound is good. It also shows you how to select the correct input and output devices for sound in case you are having any problems.



Using the active speaker window
This video shows you how to find and use the active speaker window. This enables you to find out who is within 'voice range' of you, as well as enabling you to balance out the volume of the voices around you and even to mute other speakers if you just want to listen in to one person.



Using 'IM Call' for pair and group work
If you have large groups of students all in close proximity to each other, running activities like pair or group work can be chaotic as everyone hears what everyone else is saying. This video shows you how to use the 'IM Call' feature to put the students into pairs or groups, so that they only hear the people they are working with. Then you as the teacher can move between the groups monitoring, without having to hear the whole class all at once.



Balancing out relative volumes
Second Life has a lot of different sound sources, such as the ambient sound of trees and water around you, the sounds of gestures, background music, media players and th voices of people speaking. This video shows you how to balance out the sounds and turn off the ones you don't want to hear.



I would be really interested to hear comments from anyone who has used Video conferencing and or Second Life. Which do you prefer?

If you are new to or haven't tried Second Life yet, then I hope you find these videos useful and they encourage you to try it out. The videos were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best
Nik Peachey

My other postings on Second Life and virtual worlds

• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

Visit my YouTube Channel to watch more of my videos
http://youtube.com/NikPeachey

Top tools for e-learning

For a while now Jane Hart over at Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day has been collecting the top 10 favourite tools of a range of people involved in e-learning.

These have been compiled into a top 100 from, would you believe it, a directory of over 2,000! Anyway, I'm proud to say that I have now also contributed my own top 10 to the collection. I think this is a great idea so do check out the collection. The collection of 2,000 is also categorized, so if you are looking for something particular, like a tool for blogging, (there are more than 70 of those) or a Virtual World tool (there are 31 in this category alone!) then it's a great place to look. Anyway, if you'd rather not go through all those at the moment, here's a look at the 10 I submitted as my top 10 tools.

Nik's Top 10 Tools as at 20 March 2008

1. Blogger: This is my basic essential survival tool for writing my blogs. As I look around more I realise it's probably not the best tool in the world for creating blogs, but it's certainly an easy tool to use and one that does the job well and doesn't cost anything.
2. Second Life: I seem to have gotten drawn into Second Life, despite the fact that it's far from my favourite virtual world, and I now rent my own office space there. I was drawn in by an increasing amount of course design work that I get related to it and a fascination with the interface and the illusion of 3D. Great place to take a meeting too, much prefer it to using Skype.
3. NVU: This is a new tool that I've started using recently for web management and development. I have been using DreamWeaver for quite some time, but decided to make the switch to a free tool that I could use on both PC and MAC as my copy of DreamWeaver became increasingly out of date and unstable. So far it's worked out pretty well and the learning curve has been quite simple to deal with.
4. Instapaper: This is another free tool which I use almost every day. It's a sort of cross between a temporary favourites page and an annotation / bibliography tool. It creates a small plug in for my Firefox task bar and whenever I spot something I want to read I click on a read later button which saves the link to my Instapaper page. Then when I have some time I can go back and read through the articles and either delete them, annotate them as a bibliography or just leave them as read.
5. Stumble upon: This is one of my favourite plug ins for Firefox. It's a great way to find new sites and I use it when ever I have a free moment. You can create your own favourites page and share the sites you find as well as adding new sites and reviewing them. But the best feature is just clicking on the Stumble button and looking at random sites that matches my interest criteria
6. Google Browser sync for Firefox: This is another great plug in for Firefox and it enables me to sync history, favourites, passwords etc across my Firefox browser on any computer. I frequently have a MAC and PC running at the same time and so this keeps all my browser information synchronised without me having to do anything apart from install the plug in.
7. Google analytics: This is a great way to track stats for websites and blogs etc and it's free. The information is a lot more accurate and in depth than many paid for tools and gives me loads of information about my site content, where my visitors are coming from and what they are looking at etc. I'm addicted to it!
8. Hottnotes: Juggling lots of different projects along with family commitments and running my own business can get a bit overwhelming sometimes. Hottnotes really helps me keep on top of things and remember those meetings and phone conferences. I can create post-it type reminders for my desk top or to-do lists and program them to remind me when specific tasks should be done. Essential stuff, just a shame there isn't a MAC version.
9. BBFlashback: This is the only tool in my top 10 that I have actually paid for. It's a software tool for recording screen cast tutorials and I've used it for all of the tutorials on my blog. It's easy to use, reliable and adding branding, call-outs and audio is all pretty easy. It also exports to a lot of different formats including Flash swf files and avi files. I can also import short avi video files made on my digital camera and edit them and then export them to Flash (I find that useful honest!)
10. My Yahoo Feed Reader: I'm sure this probably isn't the best feed reader in the world but MyYahoo homepage is what I started with and I've got comfortable and stuck with it. RSS is one of those really big time savers and I can scan all of the new content on my favourite sites and blogs in just a few minutes and pick out the things I'm interested in reading, not to mention my horoscope and world news. It's saved me hours of going from site to site.

Hope you enjoy these.

Best
Nik

Second Life Teacher Training Videos

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.


The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.

Russell has made an excellent job editing these into two main groups. You can find the easier ones here at Second Life Part 1 and some of the trickier ones here Second Life Part 2.

Russell has built them into a really handy interface, so that they load quickly and you can skip through the index to the ones you want.

This is the first set of movie tutorials I have created using Camtasia Studio and with voice. As you may know, the ones I create for this blog are always silent with 'call out' texts and are created using BBFlashback.

I've always avoided using audio on my own blog ones as I'm a bit self-conscious about my voice and I've felt that using text makes them easier to understand and keeps the file sizes a bit smaller. Any feedback on this would be very welcome as I'm considering changing over and using voice more.

Anyway. I hope you like the videos and find them useful. There's also a wealth of other useful materials on Russell's site, (as I said in my review of it last year) so be sure to check out the rest of it when you get a minute.

Best

Nik

PS: The image above is of my avatar in my Second Life office. Feel free to visit and look around. It's on Edunation Island at: http://tinyurl.com/ytz5go