ISTE Blogger’s Hut for Educational Blogs

Helloooooo, all. Scott Merrick, here. I’m Scottmerrick Oh in Second Life and I blog frequently at my little Oh! Virtual Learning effort. I’ll be doing some cross-posting when I feel that’s appropriate, but this little introductory post here is mostly to let you know about our blogging resource at ISTE Island, the Blogger’s Hut. Designed to be informative and fun, sorta the way learning should be, it’s there for any and all educational bloggers, not just those of us covering our favorite MUVE. There’s a brief inro to blogs, there are links to videos, and there are now two windows of blogbuttons so that you can go find new blogs for your RSS feed aggregator simply by browsing the blogs that result from clicking the buttons.

Every month, a polling station collects votes for the featured Blog-o-the-month whose RSS feed will be displayed all month in the RSS object, allowing quick scan of subject headers. Clicking on the RSS box will open up the featured blog for your reading enjoyment. This month, it’s Jeff Agamenoni’s “From Mr. A to Mr. Z” and I’m pleased that Jeff (Henny Zimer in SL) is not one of your long-running blogstars, but a relative newcomer to the discipline: That’s the beauty of democratic vote, ya’ll! I love Jeff’s fresh-from-Montana perspectives on teaching and learning and the wonder he shares with us as he discovers new tools for teaching.

Come see me at ISTE Island, where I occasionally docent, along with the dozens of other teacher-volunteers who do so, and by all means vote for your favorite blog for RSS display the month of September: This month we’re choosing between four stellar examples of leading edge thought about teaching and learning. The predictable thing to do, of course, is to list them here, but I’d rather have you visit this SLurl and check them out!

See ya at SLCC!!! Oh, and if you can’t get there, I’ll be streaming some sessions into ISTE Island from Tampa. Either way, I hope to see you there!!

Posted by Scottmerrick Oh (Scott Merrick)

One of the more surreal aspects of Second Life is having a vivid voice chat conversation with a character where their mouth never moves. For years, avatars at There.com have had lip sync or at least, mouth movement, to audio.

Well, my Second Life talking friends, you can have that too with the Second Life Lipsync Viewer. This is a set of files you download and replace in your original Second Life application (see the bottom of the docs page and the Readme that comes with the download).

Now your lips move with the volume of your voice! Here is a brief test (it did not work with my dog avatar, so I had to play a human)

If you like this, vote for it to be rolled into the regular viewer.

A simply amazing new way to navigate Second Life.

To learn more about Mitch Kapor’s hands-free navigation read here.