New SL Tools

Posted: 31st August 2008 by Gavin Dudeney in Second Life
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This week, in the dead of night when I should have been sleeping, I knocked out three new free teaching tools which all work on the same principle, but which I hope will have individual uses beyond the ones my feebly tired brain has been able to come up with..

WordRezz was a favour for somebody who had seen a similar tool elsewhere in SL, but knew it was either not available or would be very expensive. It’s basically a board onto which a tutor (or learners) can rez words in one of six columns. Depending on the permissions set before the words are rezzed, they can then be moved around, or deleted. It should be ideal for all sorts of language work – grammar, vocabulary, etc., as well as diagram labelling and a few other things that involve manipulating text.

BrainBox works on the same principle, but allows a group of people to brainstorm words or concepts in random places on a board. Again, these words can be deleted and moved around (according to permissions) and it should be a good tool for creative meetings, writing classes, etc.

ListBoard simply rezzes lists of words in four columns – no control over placement when they’re rezzed (it fills column one first, then column two, etc.) but the words can be moved and deleted after rezzing.

I showed  them all off at one of the regular teachers’ meetings on Friday evening and they went down well. I also got some useful feedback after the session and have spent the weekend acting on that feedback and improving the tools. One notable suggestion was the incorporation of support for UTF8 character sets (think ¿ and ñ for those of us who live in Spain) and that has now been done, so I’m releasing the tools into the wild and we’ll see what happens.

As always, you can find them at the following places:

And, as always, they’re all free and unsupported!