I have gradually been spending more time back at the ITRT Retreat recently and felt like something was missing, something one would typically find in a wooded area of Virginia. So, I went shopping for a bird and was thrilled to find a cardinal. Our little red friend is now happily flitting around the center of our retreat. Come pay him a visit!

My office in the ITRT Retreat is located on the third floor of the treehouse. I had the most difficult time trying to decide how to furnish it. Did I really want a desk and chair in Second Life? What on earth would I do with them? I don’t even have a desk of my own in my Real Life job, but that’s a sad story for another blog.

So, since I love playing the piano, and I wanted something that absolutely could not happen in Real Life, I decided to furnish my treehouse office with my favorite instrument. After many hours of searching and playing, I decided on the Blueberry Hill version at Serendipity Studios.

The piano came bundled with several different candelabras that were absolutely beautiful but way too high prim to keep out on the floor. They will be saved for special occasions only. Wow, talk about transforming a treehouse!

The piano also came with a selection of 12 songs from the 50’s.

My partner in crime, Tyna, returned recently to SL, much to my joy, and she took a turn playing a lovely rendition of “Peggy Sue.”

So, please come visit us at the ITRT Retreat and teleport to the third floor of the treehouse. Have a seat on the piano bench and click on the keys to start the music. Have fun, and send me a picture!

I’ve been working on getting the ITRT Retreat ready for primetime, and in the process, I’ve learned a lot about the more technical aspects of this vast new world. We needed a bridge, and I could not find one that wasn’t either too high prim or just too fancy for a woodsy setting, so I decided to try my hand at building. My first stop was Ivory Tower, a very impressive site containing numerous tutorials and examples for using the building tools already available in Second Life. After spending a couple of days with those lessons, I was able to create a bridge that I think will work out just fine.

Next came some exploration with the SL scripting language. We wanted to allow avatars to choose from a list of landmarks when they click on a prim rather than just giving them a dozen landmarks one after the other. I finally found an example that changed the chat window colors using llDialog, so at least I knew what the proper function was. After a few visits to the Linden Scripting Language Portal, I was able to create a dropdown type box with the choices as button labels. After that little adventure, I found that I had a wealth of free scripts from various sources that were easily edited to meet our needs. Many thanks to the SL community for doing an outstanding job of commenting and documenting every script I have opened.

Finally, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so it was time to lighten up a bit. We put two innertubes in the creek for folks to ride. The script had to be altered to allow everyone to ride, not just the owners, but it works now! I found a plastic float that I placed under the waterfall. You never know when you just need a nice relaxing float trip under a cool mist. In the Recreation Center, there is a tictactoe board on the wall, a beach ball that responds to touch, and a trampoline that bounces you up to the ceiling. There are other goodies free for the taking in each cabin and hidden in one of the caves.

OK, back to scripting….but I’d much rather be relaxing underneath that waterfall!

We owe a great deal of thanks to Tigerlilly for coming up with the name for our site. We are happy to announce the ITRT Retreat for all Instructional Technology Resource Teachers in Virginia and anyone else who would like to join us. We hope to have a grand opening sometime in September after the beginning of the year is over and everyone has time to come up for air.

Our Welcome Center cabin will have information about us and offer a free ITRT shirt. The Educators Resource cabin will offer lots of landmarks that educators will find useful. The Recreation Center cabin will be a fun place to hang out or grab some landmarks to entertaining locations in Second Life.

In keeping with our Virginia theme (you did notice the state flag, didn’t you?) Tyna added some wildlife to our property, complete with sound effects. We have our own pet squirrel and a whole family of ducks.

Well, I went on a trip overseas and Tyna developed our new property on EduIsland 3. Wow! What a terrific job she did! We now have a waterfall cave, another cave, a treehouse, three cabins, and a campfire. Tyna even terraformed the land so we have a stream flowing through the cave with the waterfall. Now the hard part begins…deciding how we can actually use this property for something for other educators to use, especially those folks in Virginia.

We spent several hours brainstorming and came up with the following ideas:

Treehouse ~ 3 levels: each of us will have an office and the other level will be a meeting spot

Cabins ~ a center for ITRT specific resources, an educational center, and a fun spot

Campfire ~ a relaxing place for impromptu meetings

Cave ~ bloggers cave

Waterfall cave ~ no educational purpose at present, but it certainly is pretty!

Well, maybe its purpose is pure fun, and at the end of the day, what educator doesn’t appreciate a little fun?

Tyna and I are getting a little more serious about creating a space for Virginia ITRTs to meet and collaborate in world. We are planning to purchase some land so we can have our own space….more on that after the purchase is final. We have started a group in SL called ITRT and would love to have any Virginia educators who are interested to join us. We’ll get the word out after we have our physical space a little more organized. We don’t know of many VA public school folks who are involved in SL at this point, so we believe that we’re actually on the cutting edge here. The possibilities are so exciting! With ISTE having an ever increasing presence in SL and now with VSTE creating a space too, we need to brainstorm…share ideas…and just generally learn how to use this new technology that is sometimes referred to as Web 3.0. Whether we like it or not, virtual worlds will become much more prominent in the future. Hopefully, some of that will filter into education in a form that will be safe for elementary children and their teachers.

Please come join our ITRT group! (In Second Life, click on Search, then the Groups tab, and search for ITRT. When it comes up, click on the join button. That’s all there is to it!)

Meet my friend TigerLilly, my coworker in Real Life, who finally broke down and joined Tyna and me in SL. Guess she got tired of hearing us discuss our adventures and schemes when she got to work each day. Actually, the only time we ever have a chance to talk is during lunch, and that’s only when we plan to eat together. We’re all so busy this time of year that SL truly does become a welcome escape! Summer’s coming though! You know that they say…the three reasons for teaching are June, July, and August.

We took Tiger to NOAA with us since we had so much fun there the last time. She rode up on a weather balloon, visited a melting glacier, and experienced a tsunami. The most exciting part of the adventure though was the ride into the eye of a hurricane. Things were going along just fine until I zoomed in with my camera into the cockpit so I could see all 3 of us inside and decided to take a snapshot. That’s when the plane literally kicked us out! Guess there was a no-picture policy onboard! Or perhaps the hurricane force winds were just too strong for that aircraft. Either way, Tiger and I both fell straight down into the ocean below, but Tyna was thrown across the sim into unknown lands.

So, pay a visit to NOAA, but just be prepared for the unexpected.

Over the past week, we had the pleasure of visiting with three Instructional Technology Resource Teachers from a neighboring school division. They are Anastasia, Tallulah, and Moona. We would like to create a place in Second Life for ITRTs to gather, meet, and share ideas and resources. Once we’re a little more experienced with SL and have time to formulate a plan, we hope to get the word out to more ITRTs in Virginia and invite them to a group social. So, if you happen to be a Virginia ITRT who stumbled upon this post, please leave a comment so we can keep in touch within Second Life.

Thanks to Robin Wood’s great tutorials and templates, I have created an ITRT t-shirt. It was really easy to follow these directions…The only hard part was creating the logo! Now I need to put it in a box to leave on our balcony so other ITRTs can pick up the shirt. Guess I need to find a script that will keep regenerating the shirts too. Oh well, something new to learn!