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Virtual_Language_Travel

Page history last edited by ElizabethHS 14 years, 4 months ago

Virtual Language Travel

‘Real’ language travel is a tour package that comprises classroom lessons in a local school with field trips to sightseeing places in the surrounding area. Often or not it also includes homestay with a family. What a fun way to learn a language.

This kind of language learning is immersive, sociable, interesting and exciting and often a great experience at the beginning of a deeper involvement with the language. If you can afford it!

In this EVO session we are seeking to replica the concept of language travel to be conducted entirely with online resources, virtual classroom teaching and a total immersive virtual environment such as Second Life. We will learn hands-on how to use virtual classroom technology for teaching the language and how to explore virtual worlds for practising the language.

Objectives

By the end of this session you should:

be able to create a portfolio for a language course which comprises all of the facets as typical language travel experience in various target languages
be able to find sightseeing places in Second Life, create an image brosure for the learners and learn to conduct a tour
have collected free language learning resources on the net
have introduced our learners to sociable habitats such as peer-learning communities
have created attractive marketing material to invite and entice students to take your virtual language travel course

Target audience

This session is aimed at experienced EVO session participants, language course designers and webheads. Experience in Second Life and in virtual classroom technology is a pre-requiste and the range of technology deployed during this session is of high level and NOT for newbees.

Just to re-iterate that this session is all about creating the marketing material for a virtual language travel offer. It is not about learning the various technologies rather than creating material, such as for example a video recording of a language lesson in a virtual classroom or photos of a trip to virtual Paris or a podcast with the sounds of a bazaar or a brosure or a blog with the complete language travel information etc.

This material should 'entice' and 'attract' potential students. It is designed to sell your course.

Sponsors

CALL IS, EFL IS, VWLL IS

Weekly Overview

Registration	REGISTRATION Week January 4-10, 2010 During registration week, the participants will begin 'breaking the ice' by signing up to this NING site and introducing each other in the forum. You will also receive a technical skills survey questionnaire and a doodle meeting planner for scheduling the group sessions. PLEASE NOTE: This session is designed for experienced EVO session participants, language course designers and webheads. Experience in Second Life and in virtual classroom technology (WizIQ etc.) is a pre-requisite and the range of technology deployed during this session is of high level and NOT for newbees.
Planning and booking a language travel tour	Week 1 January 11-17, 2010 Theme: Planning and booking a language travel tour During the first week we start planning our virtual language travel offer and may spend sometime looking at ‘real’ language travel offers and to see what we can duplicate. We familiarize ourselves with various sites which offer travel packages and look at the individual components of the tour.
Setting sail	Week 2 January 18-24, 2010 Theme: Setting sail During the second week of activities, we will continue planning the tour and start building our trip. At this stage we can already create a portfolio of free resources for our learners such as vocabulary trainer, online dictionaries, podcasts, multi-media learning software, videos. At this time when small groups form to collaborate on a language or topic specific field of expertise.
Sightseeing places and field trips	Week 3 January 25-31, 2010 Theme: Sightseeing places and field trips During week 3, we will join the Teaching Languages in a Virtual World EVO session to to go sightseeing in Second Life. Together with the EVO moderator team Graham, Nergiz, Wlodek, Dennis etc. we will be traveling in Second Life and taking lots of fabulous photos of virtual cities, sandy beaches, sun sets and all.
Language lessons in class	Week 4 Februay 1-7, 2010 Theme: Language lessons in class In week 4 we will host several live online sessions at different times and will call on language educators to prepare and to conduct teaching and learning activities for our learners. Some team members conduct the sessions whilst others humbly play students. The recordings maybe used lateron to present the outcomes at the end of the Evo sessions and may also serve to promote your offer on youtube.
Making friends abroad	Week 5 Februay 8-14, 2010 Theme: Making friends abroad During this week, we will sign up and join online peer communities such as livemocha.com, busuu.com, ning sites etc and will share our experience as to whether this has led to contacting native speakers in order to communicate in the target language. During this week we continue meeting in groups live online.
We proudly present	Week 6 Februay 15-21, 2010 Theme: We proudly present, a Virtual Language Travel Tour Package As a wrap-up we will exhibit our virtual language training packages in form of poster exhibitions, videos, blogs or image brosures and prezis/ animotos/ presto10x20 and other cool marketing material. Closing ceremony will be a big party on EduNation together with the other sessions. Of course.

Moderators

Heike Philp, head of LANCELOT School^TM GmbH and co-initiator of both EU funded LANCELOT and AVALON projects. She looks back to more than 2 decades of teaching experience, amongst others as a German teacher in Japan and England. www.lancelotschool.com

Holly Longstroth, who holds a Masters in TESOL and a Masters in Organisational Leadership, is currently teaching live online worldwide and TOEFL prep classes in the USA. Holly is LANCELOT certified and is preparing to launch a recruitment agency for language teachers and schools called ViTA, Virtual Teachers Agency.

Jan Holland, following an interesting business life that included writing and sales, Jan joined the EFL teaching community and took full advantage of the opportunities for travel that it offered. Having further completed COLT with International House and LANCELOT live online training she is now a dedicated online teacher with a strong interest in the development of Second Life.

Communication tools to be used

http://virtual-language-travel.ning.com/ This NING site for course participants

http://www.elluminate.com DimDim or Elluminate for the synchronous sessions

http://www.secondlife.com Second Life for the field trips

http://www.busuu.com, http://www.livemocha.com, etc. We will join several peer community sites for language learners to find out how they work and how we could introduce our language learners to them.

… and a long list of links for free resources on the net.

Join this session

To join this group:

From January 4 to 10:

Go to: http://virtual-language-travel.ning.com
Click on the blue button: (This is just an image). The real button is on the Yahoo Group. If you don´t have a Yahoo ID, you will be prompted to create one (it is free).
Follow the instructions

Note: When you register for the group, you will have to be approved by the moderator. In order to reduce the possibility of "unwanted" members (such as spammers), please be sure to explain who you are and why you want to enroll in the session. This message will only be seen by the session moderator

Back to Call for Participation