Speaking Pods Announcement

By Chris Flesuras on Monday, September 27, 2010 - Related Tags:- culture, learning, news, pods, speaking, tools

Whenever we did speaking exercises in the past, we used a tool that was originally designed for "speed-networking".  In other words, the participants sat in chairs that automatically paired them with a random new partner after a specified time interval (usually around 2 minutes).  This is fine when you want students paired from one large pool of people.  However, in a language exercise where you want one native-speaking instructor paired with a learner, you need a tool that will avoid pairing instructors with instructors and learners with learners.

We then approached a developer in Second Life named Fire Centaur (Paul Preibisch) about building a new tool from scratch that could pair students from two pools: instructors and learners.  We also needed a teacher HUD that would allow teachers to control the speaking pods.  In addition, we wanted an easy way for teachers to drop-in on conversations to either assist in the exercise or attend to any problems the students may have.  Paul was successful in incorporating all of this functionality into a great new tool that we have at our disposal now in Skoolaborate and Second Life.

The first test of the tool was done by Kyoto Gakuen High School in Japan and Modesto City Schools in California.  The American kids needed Japanese language lessons before their trip to Japan in April, and this provided the perfect opportunity for us to try out the new speaking pods.  Stan Trevena, the trip organizer and co-founder of the Pacific Rim Exchange (a Skoolaborate partner), wrote about the event in his blog.Here's an excerpt:

"The number of seats is fully customizable by using the associated HUD. Many other parameters are also customizable, like time to rotate seats, how many rounds the object will rotate seats, etc. Once the teacher launches the session the pods spread out in the sky, putting enough space between them so that voices don’t carry between paired students.

 

The seats are numbered for quick identification. One feature will be for the teacher to be able to teleport to selected pairs for observation or to help with the session. One very slick modification to the idea of a speed dating object is the ability to make unbalanced matchings.

 

We have very high hopes for the use of this new custom seating object in various instructional settings. It will be placed on one of the Skoolaborate islands for all to use, and Skoolaborate may eventually make it available to other educational projects for their use in the greater educational community. We’ll post more info as we employ this in upcoming events."

We are very excited about developing even more functionality to this new learning tool, and thank Paul for all his great work.  To see more photos of the speaking pods in action, check out Stan's blog here.  Also, have a look at Paul's YouTube channel here for more information about the tools he's developing for Second Life.