Touring Historical Landmarks

I just wrapped up another quest in the GameLab. I spent a lot of time on this quest because I thought it this Quest was probably the most beneficial when thinking about education and Second Life. I chose the historical note card because it interested me the most. I was excited to check out all of the locations and wanted to spend some quality time in each one to see it from my student's prospective.


The first location was the WWI recreation site. There was a literacy twist to this place, a lot of transcripts, poems, etc. There was also a recreation of the trenches, which I got to experience first hand from my avatar's perspective. Of course, we will never be able to really experience what it was like in the trenches this was fairly accurate. There were planes flying over, and the noises made it really life-like. The literacy twist made this really applicable for today's education standards. NCLB focuses so much on literacy and math, I think it is really important to incorporate reading and literacy into my social studies class. This location gave me a few ideas on how to do so.

The Utah location reminded me so much of Oregon Trail!!! It's this generations Oregon Trail:) I didn't get too much into this location because there were a lot of rules and I wasn't sure if I was breaking one and didn't want to get kicked out!! I think if I had a little more background and/or could contact the creator this would be something I would use in my classroom. The students would have to get dressed in the clothes, get ready to live in a simulated world.

Obviously the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was really my favorite aspect of this trip. WWII and the Holocaust are two of my favorite topics in history--it really is a shame we don't get to devote an entire class to that time period in most high schools. That time period really shaped the rest of our history and the Holocaust has shown us what a genocide is, and we can relate it to many of the current genocides that have occurred in our recent history. Literacy was prevalent here too! After wandering around the museum and looking at the exhibits the goal is to be able to report what happened on Kristallnacht and how the Jewish people were feeling during that time. The note cards were really informative without being too wordy, most were a paragraph.

There were a few links that did not work or that I wasn't too excited about. Cherokee Island wasn't available, and I was bummed I thought this one would be really exciting. The Parthenon loaded, but I was on an island. I realize Greece is an island--but I've been to the Parthenon in person and it was marble and rock not grass:) The Great Wall of China was a little disappointing too, I don't know if I just wasn't into it at the time. I thought there were too much going on around me and SL was running very very slow.