Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Creating a space in Second Life

At the Technology in Education program director's request, I've been working on outfitting a building on the Chicago Public Schools "island" in Second Life for NLU's Technology in Education and SLIS programs.

The building that the Chicago Public Schools designated for us to use is an "Arts and Crafts" style building, supposed to represent a Chicago bungalow. I didn't build the building, which has two floors and a rooftop deck. In addition to furnishing the first two floors, I also built a SkyDeck, which is outfitted to be a classroom.

So far, the Roof-Top Deck is empty…I'm thinking of putting some kind of Lounge or recreational area there.

I'll continue to tweak this further, but it's certainly usable now. You can find it here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Chicago%20Public%20Schools/37/231/23.

Here's a brief tour.

This is a map of the CPS "island". Notice the "river" designed to represent the Chicago river. The NLU building is all the way on the upper left. The large tan rectangle is the SkyDeck from "space":

This is the building from the front. Behind it is a region called "Land of Lincoln…that's a model of the Lincoln Memorial on the right:

This is inside the first floor:. The screen to the left can display web pages…..it's showing the TIE page on the NCE site. The red, yellow, and green balls are "teleporters" to enable one to go to the second floor, roof, and skydeck:

This is another view inside the first floor (notice the SLIS web page information on the left):

This is looking into the first floor through the back window. Notice the TIE brochure (and our program director's pretty face) on the wall:

This is the second floor conference room. (I spent about $2.22 on the conference table and chairs…they have animations built into them.) The collage on the right is from the Lisle Thursday TIE group that finished in Fall of 2007:

This is the Sky Deck. The screen can show images (including PowerPoint) and videos:

We look forward to using this space!!! (Stay tuned!)