I had my first experience in a virtual world and this was the world of edMondo.

Five minutes before this picture was taken, we were around 10 people in there. Our task was to build some walls and add some texture to them to make them look like walls. Building objects was easy with a short intro, and soon after that it became very clear what all the possibilities are. I also, funnily, enjoyed to ‘dress’ my avatar, and to fly around. Yes, you can do that in edMondo.

This special world of edMondo was built by INDIRE (Ministry of Education in Italy) for Italian schools. The world is deserted except for lots of kids who have their own special places in this world and build and do things together in a protected environment.

Language teaching and learning can be very rewarding in such a setting. Heike Philp had a convincing workshop on that, and she’s also very active in SecondLife. A new virtual world is sine.space, which is very interesting because it is web based (no installation of additional software).

I understood the appeal of virtual worlds with all its facets, finally.

The following pictures shows Heike Philp, Liana, Luciana, Silvana and me during our post-iED meetup in Second Life.