EC&I 832: Second Life and Me (Part 1 anyway)
January 27, 2010
Hello Everyone!
As most of you know (if you’ve read my intro that is, hehe) I’m a bit familiar with Second Life, having been a virtual resident for nearly 2 years now. I have been doing some exploring in-world lately with more of an educational focus in mind and I’ve got some things lined up that I’m exploring and I’ll share those with you once some other pieces have fallen into place for me. (I’m touring a medical facility on Saturday and I’ll take some pictures and post them here in a video for you later!) For now, though, I thought I’d show you my island home, or at least a very short 30 second video of some pictures of it anyway. I piggy-backed on Michelle vanGinneken’s idea of creating an Animoto video with the images. It was super easy to do! Thanks Michelle for the excellent tip!
I do find, however, that the free version of this won’t be sufficient for me. Sigh. 30 seconds is just too short! But $30 a year isn’t a bad deal to purchase the upgrade I guess 
I wish there were more freebies for instructors really. It can get expensive fast to sign up for a lot of different tools. Anyway… I hope you like the video I have created here and I’ll be making some more very soon!
PS. All of the landscaping and the positioning of things (some of them built, many things purchased in-world) was done exclusively by me and my love and SL partner. He did a lot of the landscaping and terraforming parts of the sim and I did the bulk of the interior decorating. Unfortunately with THIS video you only get flash glimpses of the exterior of the island. It was only when the video was done that I realized I had tried to cram WAY too many images into a 30 second slot, haha. Oh well. It’s a steep learning curve I’m on, but at least I AM learning 
Updated! New full length video clip:
Michelle,
As an educator you can apply for a free full service Animoto account (and for your students as well). Go to http://animoto.com/education and fill in the application.
- G
:O
I wish I had known this yesterday, lol. I already bought my account for the year. Oh well. This is very handy information to have for my students anyway! Thanks loads for the tip!
Hey – Looks like a large world you have created in Second Life! I too, did not know that Animoto was free for educators. I will have to check it out.
I can’t wait to see your final project in SL – Is that the option you will be taking? I am still searching for the right idea for mine. Not sure what form it will take and I would like to see what other information is presented before I tackle it.
I will keep a watch out for medical tour – is it associated with an institution of some kind?
No pressure to answer this question specifically – but have you invested much money in SL? Owning an island sounds super expensive.
Hi Michelle! It is a large place actually. I have a better video I’m going to post here right away. It uses a lot of the same images plus a lot more
I am planning to do the SL project, yes, for this course. Still not sure how it’ll end up functioning right now, but I’m excited about it! The medical tour I’m going on is associated with a Canadian medical college. It’s called the Ann Meyers Medical Center and here is their blog page:
http://ammc.wordpress.com/
I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and make some notes about the tour.
I have invested a lot in SL, yes, but it’s really my sole luxury that I give myself. I don’t go out a lot and any money I’ve spent has been well worth it! My partner and love, Arsene, purchased our island and maintains the monthly fees (which are about $300 US per month) and I take care of the rents for another half sim we own in an RP place
It is a substantial amount, but it has allowed a degree of freedom of expression for the two of us that is hard to match, particularly because of our geographical and time zone differences. He lives in France 7 hours ahead of my time zone. SL has proved to be an incredibly rich world for the two of us and any cent paid has been well worth it in our case 
I really enjoyed the tours. I honestly had no idea of the possibilities for creation and virtual existence. Lovely island, incredible scale and design.
[...] shows using images I captured from my Second Life experiences and these shows can be viewed in a previous post I made on this blog site. The only thing I’d like to see changed about the Animoto [...]