1) Geography teachers at Ang Mo Kio Secondary School partnered with an NIE researcher to incorporate the virtual world of Second Life into their geography lessons.
2) In Second Life, students could explore 3D versions of landforms and rivers, which provided learning opportunities not possible with textbooks alone.
3) Teachers spent significant time planning lessons in Second Life to ensure objectives were met. They found Second Life created a less stressful environment for students to learn from mistakes.
1. 4/8/2015 Bringing Second Life to Geography Lessons | SingTeach | Education Research for Teachers
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“While they are presenting,
we will ask why they chose to
do something that way. It
could be a mistake that they
had made and these are
teachable moments.
– Clara Lim on seizing
teachable moments afforded
by technology
Bringing Second Life to Geography Lessons
The learning of physical geography has taken on a new dimension for students at Ang Mo
Kio Secondary School. This was made possible by teachers who partnered with an NIE
researcher to bring Second Life into their classrooms.
(From left to right) Clara Lim, Habibah Ismail, and Jasvir Kaur and their students
explore a virtual world–Second Life–as part of their Geography lessons.
Give a student a textbook and he or she may learn, but only as much as what the pages can hold.
But immerse the same student in a virtual world and the learning possibilities become endless.
NIE Research Scientist Dr Kenneth Lim used to be a Geography teacher, and he is always thinking
of ways to use technology to enhance teaching and learning. In 2009, he approached a group of
teachers from Ang Mo Kio Secondary School with a research intervention (Find out more about
Kenneth and his project in “Breathing a Second Life into Geography Teaching” in ReEd, Volume 2).
Ever since then, they have been working closely.
“Kenneth approached us and had training sessions with a few of us for Second Life,” Mrs Habibah
Ismail, Subject Head of Geography, says. “We then had a pilot study before embarking on the actual
use of Second Life in the classroom.”
Second Life is an online virtual world, which allows users to create their own avatars and worlds. As
part of the intervention, it was used in Geography lessons to let students explore different landforms.
This intervention eventually sparked the interest of 3 other schools that also joined in the
collaboration.
Plan to Teach
To ensure that the use of Second Life was tailored
specifically to meet the learning needs of the students,
the team went through extensive preparation before
every lesson.
“The execution of the lesson is not difficult, but to
make it easy, you have to plan,” Habibah says. “We
have to decide what the processes, stages and focus
of the lessons are.”
Along with two other Geography teachers, they meet
up regularly with Kenneth to discuss how they wish to
teach a topic. “Kenneth considers us the experts in
terms of content. That is very much left to us – how we want to fulfil our objectives through
instruction, because we are the practitioners,” Habibah says. “But he oversees how we can match
our goals with Second Life.”
Together, they would brainstorm how best to do it. For example, for the topic on rivers, they decided
Home › issue 52 mar 2015 › Bringing Second Life to Geography Lessons
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