Teaching with SoaS

Flash Fiction Center is an OpenSimulator Archive (OAR file) for educators interested in teaching creative writing online using virtual worlds. The environment is designed to help students learn about flash fiction and to motivate them to write this type of concise story. On this region, students will find information about flash fiction, micro-fiction, drabble, nano-fiction, along with writing tasks and working laptops connected to the Internet - in this case to wordcounter.net. Students will also be able to add their stories to ‘story boxes’ placed near each writing task panel. Teachers can later add those stories to the 'writing task libraries'. Free Full Avatar Kits Because entering a virtual world will probably be a new experience for some students, free full avatar kits (for male and female) are provided at the center. Here's a video made at Flash Fiction Center running on Sim-on-a-Stick: Find out more about this project here . Flash Fiction Center OA...

OAR and IAR files are very useful but they can be a bit confusing at first. OpenSimulator Archive (OAR) The OpenSimulator Archive (OAR) function has existed since OpenSimulator 0.5.9. The facility does a similar job to load-xml2/save-xml2 in that it saves prims so that they can be later reloaded. However, OpenSimulator archives (OAR) go a step further in that they can save all the necessary asset data so that you may fully restore the terrain, region parcel data, the textures of objects and their inventories when loaded onto a completely different system using a different asset database. Source: OpenSimulator.org OpenSimulator Inventory Archives (IARs) OpenSimulator Inventory Archives (IARs) are a means by which inventory folders and items can be saved offline to a single file (an IAR). This file can then be loaded into a different OpenSimulator installation. Like OpenSim Archives, IARs save all the necessary asset data required to fully restore the items including te...

Join us today, December 11, at 19:00 UTC / 7 pm London / 11 am San Francisco, for a free webinar on  Using SoaS to Create Portable Virtual Libraries . The purpose of this webinar is to help educators interested in using Sim-on-a-Stick to create OpenSim based virtual libraries that can run offline on a USB flash drive. The webinar will take place at Learning Lab on the OpenSim grid Craft World. Instructions on how to get to Learning Lab are available on this page:  http://teachingwithsoas.blogspot.pt/p/learning-lab.html

One of the great advantages of teaching with SoaS is the fact that Sim-on-a-Stick works offline. For some educators, however, this feature may actually be detrimental to their goals. They may want to create a grid instead of just one virtual world. They might even want to open their virtual world to the HyperGrid, so that educators and students from other grids may visit their sim. For those educators, Outworldz DreamWorld is probably a better option than SoaS. The Outworldz DreamWorld is a free, pre-packaged Windows-compatible virtual reality Opensimulator system that is easy to install, easy to run, and powerful. It it free and is open source. Anyone can run their own grid from home or at work. DreamWorld automatically configures routers for the Hypergrid with Plug and Play. It is preconfigured for the Hypergrid, and has both the "Diva" version of OpenSim 0.8.2.1 with Diva’s WiFi admin interface, and the latest Version (0.9) of Opensimulator for you to use. It ta...

Ener Hax, the founder of Sim-on-a-Stick, created a useful video-tutorial explaining how to install SoaS on a computer. The current version of SoaS is different, but the process of installing it remains the same. Learn more about using SoaS at An Introduction to Sim-on-a-Stick

If you're interested in teaching with SoaS, the best place to start is this page: An Introduction to Sim-on-a-Stick After that, you might want to take at look at Teaching with SoaS Frequently Asked Questions . If you're a librarian,  Using SoaS to Create Portable Virtual Libraries might interest you as well. Also, if you have questions about these topics, please consider joining Teaching with SoaS group on Facebook .

Join us Monday, December 11, at 19:00 UTC / 7 pm London / 11 am San Francisco, for a free webinar on  Using SoaS to Create Portable Virtual Libraries . The purpose of this webinar is to help educators interested in using Sim-on-a-Stick to create OpenSim based virtual libraries that can run offline on a USB flash drive. The webinar will take place at Learning Lab on the OpenSim grid Craft World. Instructions on how to get to Learning Lab are available on this page:  http://teachingwithsoas.blogspot.pt/p/learning-lab.html

The OpenSimulator Archive (OAR) function has existed since OpenSimulator 0.5.9. The facility does a similar job to load-xml2/save-xml2 in that it saves prims so that they can be later reloaded. However, OpenSimulator archives (OAR) go a step further in that they can save all the necessary asset data so that you may fully restore the terrain, region parcel data, the textures of objects and their inventories when loaded onto a completely different system using a different asset database. Source: OpenSimulator.org OAR is one of the most amazing and useful functions of OpenSim that we can use with SoaS. However, after learning about OAR files for the first time during a presentation, educators often become worried about its complexity. Granted: at first glance, working with OAR files can look like something too complicated to even try in class. Actually, loading an OAR file using just the basic command is extremely easy - and fast, too, depending on the size of the file you'...

Join us tomorrow, December 3rd, at 7 pm London Time, on Learning Lab , for a Q&A Session about Teaching with Sim-on-a-Stick.