Second Life

When you here about "Second Life", you must think about "Virtual World".

It is an online 3D virtual world imagined and designed by you and from the moment you enter Second Life, you'll discover a universe brimming with people and possibilities. The aim of this innovation is to make you create an avatar and then let you create and explore your dreamed and perfect future world, with what you want inside.

It is very complicated to use and that can take ages to finish your virtual world. The person who introduced me to Second Life is actually working on his virtual world since 3 years. Second Life is for people aged 18 and over, so can strictly not be used in primary classroom. In addition, Second Life is not secured, not free and does not provide any useful educational benefits.

My opinion about Second Life is that it is a really strange innovation which is too much focused on a "fiction future"; I'm enjoying the present and I don't really like to think about a proper future!! ;-)

Wiki !

The first innovation I learned about in my computer class was: Wiki.

I was not very sure about what was a Wiki before the teacher's presentation in class; I only knew "Wikipedia", and I couldn't really make the difference between wikis and blogs.

I learned that a wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of informations, resources, hyper links, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites in which anyone can contribute and add something. Whereas Blogs are personnel, people can only add comments on each other blogs. Wikis often provide great informations about anything you are looking for.

Wikis' characteristics:

- very simple and easy to edit your wiki

- anyone can edit and add stuff on a wiki

- wikis record document histories

- creating links is simple with wikis

- wikis keep track off all your stuff (as it stores everything, it knows about all your links and pages)

Using wiki in a classroom can be very useful; firstly, to stores everything important and useful documents the teacher has and want to keep; secondly, to share online information and resources with children, giving them the opportunity to add some more stuff about what they have learned.

We have been asked to create our own wiki page about the innovation we worked on with our group. Feel free to visit: (the wiki page I created with my group)