I have completed two weeks (60 hours) of Alice training, yet I still have mixed feelings about the use of the program in education. There seems to be a lot of glitches with Alice 2.2. I don’t like how the program automatically saves several backup files on your computer with each world you create. Currently, there does not seem to be a way to embed the worlds you create into web pages. If you save the world as a movie file, you will lose your sound files and the world will no longer be interactive.
Alice 2.2 is the program we were using. Alice 3 may offer a different experience, but it is still in Beta testing. I found that Alice 2.2 can be frustrating even for the computer experts.
This week we were required to create a virtual Alice world that could be used in our specific discipline. Since I used to teach social studies, I decided to focus on 10th grade civics and economics. I created a world were two former students took future students on a tour of the course. I was lucky that I had podcasts saved from former students describing what they learned in civics class. I also added a clip from one of Barack Obama’s speeches where he says, “…it will be a long road, but together we can get there…”. I really liked the finished product. I also created a lesson plan to go with the world I created.
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