Calisto Encinal's Place on the Web

Richard Bair recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation which includes a study of Mi casa es su casa.  He writes:

This study established that students have three broad types of engagement with 3D VR. First, in the daily classroom students are engaged with participations, such as queries sessions, assignment discussions, and collaboration in and out of class and for distribution of class materials to colleagues. The second broad category of engagement with 3D VR was to prompt mental activities for knowledge recall, innovations and utilization of ideas, analysis of study phenomenon and contextual theories, synthesis of information and correlation, laying common value debates and analysis and pragmatisms. The third broad category of engagement with the 3D VR was projecting knowledge, skills and personal development. In this case, the learners gained career skills; improved their writing clarity, accuracy and effectiveness; thought critically and analytically; self-tutored; researched and accomplished tasks and built cohesions with colleagues.

This study confirms that 3D-VR is engaging and powerful in stimulating the leaners’ participation for various tasks both inside and outside the classroom. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that 3D VR technologies support the mental activity of the learner’s skill development, knowledge recall, idea formation and synthesis, and theoretical linkages under varied environments. The strengths of 3D VR technology to enhance writing, thinking, learning, and personal knowledge development are significant developments corroborated by current and past studies. The merits of 3D technologies that make it popular among learners and instructors include affordability, flexibility, access, and timeliness. The impact of 3D VR to reconstruct pedagogy in learning institutions is objective and essential for sustainability of the model. Both primary and secondary data and information corroborated in answering the study questions that 3D VR is effective in learning material designs and disseminations.

My presentation, entitled “El Secreto de Ek Balam: Building an Immersive Experience for Language Learners, has been accepted at the First OpenSimulator Community Conference 2013.  I will be presenting on Saturday, September 7 at 12:30 PDT.  In the presentation, I will “discuss and demonstrate El Secreto de Ek Balam, an OpenSimulator project for Spanish language learners. Although in the preliminary build stages, the project incorporates open-educational resources, game-based learning and virtual worlds to create a language platform that engages students in a more active method of language acquisition. The session will engage attendees in a discussion of virtual worlds for languages and education in general.”

Please let me know if you would like to attend and I will give you all the details.

I’ve just added two new activities to Mi Casa.  The first works on GUSTAR.  The correct usage is modeled with color-coded clues.  Then the pieces are mixed up and students must put together sentences using GUSTAR.

The second activity practices verb conjugations.  Students must conjugate verbs in order to squash creepy spiders that walk toward them.  The activity keeps the student’s score and keeps a continual total of right answers and wrong answers.