Prepare a spot in AW world (not awschool world) that you can use for emergencies. If anyone comes around disrupting a lesson you are giving a tourist in AWSchool be ready to whisper instructions to the student how to teleport there. If the student downloaded Active Worlds from the Juno website, remember that the Juno browser has a few different words from our regular Active Worlds browser. It doesn't have the word "Teleport" up at the top. Juno browsers have the word WORLD up there (as in World-To instead of Teleport-To). The spot you prepare ahead of time in Alphaworld should be in a very bare location with just the starter object there. Don't take the student to one of your own build areas - it's tempting to want to show off what you've done, but it's much better to have the emergency spot in a very non laggy area of AW. Each time you go into AWSchool with the intention of teaching, the very first thing you should do, before talking to anyone, is go check the Teaching Area you plan to use. If there is no other teacher doing a lesson there, stand on the spot where most of your lesson will take place. Check it thoroughly for objects that could interfere with the lesson. Look straight up into the sky to see if there is an object sparkling up there. Go underground to look straight down. If all seems clear, go back to GZ and wait for a lucky student to land. You hear the plaintive plea, "Is there a teacher here?" You've taken the newcomer by the hand (virtually speaking) out to the nice quiet teaching area you already had examined. What now? Where do you stand? Where do you have the student stand? What objects will you have him use? Will he be able to see them or will they just be triangles for him? What are the exact words you're going to type, to start the lesson? Find out which version your student is using by having him click HELP - ABOUT (at the upper right - not "help" in the little tabs at the left.) If he is using version 3 BE SURE to tell him that if he ever scrolls up in the chat to re-read something, the chat pauses up there until he clicks the scroll arrow. He will not see anything else you say until he gets the chat to scroll again. Let's begin with where the teacher will have the student stand. Each teacher works out the most comfortable way for himself/herself to teach. I prefer to have the student stand beside me most of the time, facing the same way I'm facing. The advantage is we are both "looking at" the same thing. The disadvantage is you have to overcome the urge to turn to see where the student is. If you've told the student "please stand beside me, facing the same way I'm facing", you'd sure better stay still yourself, facing the way you want him to face. If you start turning to see whether he is beside you or not, how is he going to know which way you want him to face? :) You can, however, do a quick "third person view" to see if the student is, indeed, beside you. But that will work only if the student is standing rather close to you. Having the student beside me, where I couldn't see him, used to be a disadvantage when the student got disconnected. I didn't know he had disappeared. But with the "whisper", it's easy to see if the student gets disconnected. His/her name will disappear from the whisper list. I've found that having the student beside me most of the time works out better for two reasons: When I need to tell him, "move the wall one more click to the left", I don't have to think about whether "left for me would be to the right for him". We're both facing the same way. Second reason: if I've told the student to stand beside me, he is less likely to start walking around on his own, getting himself into a position where he could not possibly do the next instruction correctly. I like to get the student's screen organized at this point. He may need to drag his chat window up or down so he can see 6 - 8 lines of chat at a time. The web window at the right side needs to be turned off. Even if you are accustomed to toggling the web on/off with the F7 key, it's better to have the student click SHOW at the top and turn the web window off by clicking "web" to uncheck it. Many new users have downloaded version 2. The F7 key does NOT toggle the web window in version 2. It's been so long (five years!) since I first began seeing the Object Properties box pop up, I really don't know exactly where that box is located when a newcomer rightclicks on an object for the very first time ever. So, to be on the safe side, I have students drag the Obj Prop box to the upper left of their screen. I don't want it covering the center of their view. I want them to be able to see the object they are moving, *while* it moves. Also, it's good for them to learn that the Obj Prop box can be dragged to other areas on the screen. To start the lesson, I position myself facing a little checkered wall (wall031.rwx) which is placed along the street in each Teaching Area. Usually I stand about the distance of two big walk001H's distance from the little wall. The student is beside me, also facing the little wall. When I ask him if he can see the checkered wall in front of us, he usually can. If he doesn't see it or if he has to walk almost to it to see it, I have him hit the HOME key on his keyboard to be sure he is using "first person view" (not seeing his own avatar.) The student copies the little checkered wall and moves it toward us about 30 "clicks". Having him move it that much serves two purposes. That much clicking seems like a lot to a newcomer, so it gets him used to the idea of moving his copy of a starter object a long way. It also brings his starter object well away from the street, so things he adds to it won't accidentally touch the street. Once he has the starter object near us, I have him change it into a walk001.rwx (16 click size.) I like using that walk since light colored objects are somewhat easier for the student to see clearly. It's important to use objects that you are pretty sure are already in the newcomer's cache so they don't just see a triangle for an object during the lesson. The sample house in AWSchool world is close enough to gz that the walk001.rwx and pp04.rwx objects have already loaded for the student. It's difficult enough for some students to catch on to the initial steps in building. If the first few objects they try to change disappear and become just triangles for them, I think it confuses them unnecessarily at too early a stage. It also can confuse the teacher, who *does* see the object that the student can't see. What I put one poor newcomer through, when I was a new teacher, still makes me cringe with embarrassment. He made a walk just fine, but he could not align the next object, a wall, on the edge of the floor properly. He tried *so* hard, working at it under my instructions,for a solid 30 minutes but just couldn't get it right. Even having him count the clicks wasn't helping. I remember thinking to myself, "maybe the poor kid is legally blind???". But the problem was me. I had him moving what was, to him, a triangle all over that floor. No wonder he couldn't line it up right! So, very early in the lesson, it's good to mention: "if anything I have you do makes the object disappear or results in a little black triangle sitting on the ground, be sure to tell me". If a teacher plans to have the student use objects that are not very near GZ or close to the teaching area, it might be a good idea for the teacher to put those objects in place ahead of time, near the spot where the lesson will take place. Then, when the student arrives at the teaching area, those things will go into his cache and will not appear as triangles later, during the actual lesson. Be sure to delete your teach demo objects after the lesson. What are the best objects to use for the lesson? Each teacher has his/her pet objects to teach with. The normal 8 click house objects such as pp, pw and pd fit nicely with the 16 click walk001. Exactly which objects the teacher prefers to use is not important. Far more important is that the lesson be presented clearly and with as little delay as possible between what the student does and what the teacher says next. I think a copy/paste lesson, prepared beforehand and practiced over and over is the most efficient way to teach. Since we find ourselves saying many of the same phrases to each new student, a copy/paste of your most often used phrases will make the lesson go much faster. It also saves a lot of wear and tear on you! Having the next instruction ready to appear as soon as possible after the student completes a building step is crucial in holding the student's attention. One of the biggest frustrations in teaching is to be typing out an instruction as fast as you can, only to see that the student has jumped on ahead to make overlapping floors and crooked walls! Then you've got to erase what you spent time typing, in order to type new instructions to correct the student's mistakes. Students get bored standing there waiting for you to "say something", while you are burning yourself out typing like crazy, erasing and re-typing. After each of the early lessons I gave, I used Windows Notepad to copy down everything that had been said in the chat window during the lesson. (Didn't know about the chat.txt log...duh!) I then went off to a quiet place in AW to read back through what had gone on during the lesson. Problems that had arisen were still fresh in my mind, and the student's questions were there to read over again. I still go to a "quiet spot", even to this day, to work on the wording of the lesson instructions. If you decide to change the wording of a sentence that you had used during a lesson, you need to go somewhere and type the new sentence "out loud" (make it show up in the chat window by hitting Enter) to see what it really will look like when the student reads it. Typing it into the chat line is the only way to be sure that an instruction line you want to use isn't too long for the chat window. Until I started checking it that way, I was inventing long instruction sentences that ended up appearing on screen like this: "blah, blah, blah and then change it to walk0" I use my Notepad lesson file (with word wrap turned on) stretched across the upper half of the AW window during a lesson. I make sure the chat window below is visible in case the student asks something while I'm getting the next instruction sentence highlighted and copied..but NOT pasted. Then I switch back to the AW window. Be sure not to leave Notepad "active" any longer than it takes to copy the next instruction because you won't be able to see the student's results until you click on AW to make the scenary screen "active" again. You will, however, be able to see anything new said in the chat window, even with Notepad active above it. The important thing is to leave your chat line empty until you see that the student has successfully completed what you told him to do. Have the next instruction ready (copied), but not pasted, in case the student makes a mistake that calls for you to type something else before you paste in a different instruction. Having to backspace over a long instruction that you had already pasted, and were just waiting to hit Enter, is a pain! It's a good idea for the new teacher to go to AW world and build the exact simple room or house that he plans to have the student build. Write down exactly what you would say to a student, piece by piece, as you build it. Think about where you would have the student stand while he was building it. Would you have him move to a new spot to do the next step? What is the most likely mistake he might make at some of the crucial steps? Don't worry about trying to make your first lesson plan perfect. You won't be able to anticipate everything that needs to be said. I still find myself honing and changing wording in the copy/paste lesson I've been using for almost a year now. No matter how carefully you write a copy/paste lesson, you'll have to stop at certain points to get the student to move a wall just one more click, delete a mistake he's made or answer his questions. You'll still get to do plenty of typing! :) The next step after devising your copy/paste lesson plan is get a friend or fellow teacher to be your guinea pig. Using another teacher as the "pretend" student is better, since an experienced teacher knows what problems usually arise and can best play the part of an absolute beginner. Practicing your lesson on a friend is a must, because it takes awhile to get comfortable switching back and forth from your Notepad or Wordpad lesson file to the AW window. Eventually your friends won't answer your telegrams because they'll know you want to "teach" them. :) Speaking of friends, I'd suggest that when you are teaching a student, you not try to even read telegrams that come in. Nor is it a good idea to talk to bystanders or try to help newcomers who wander by and start asking questions. That may sound rude, but it is ruder, in my opinion, to make your student wait while you take time out to talk to other people, even to newbies who are standing there begging for help. At most, say only something like, "I'm so sorry, can't talk now. I'm giving a lesson." And certainly you should never let yourself get distracted with telegrams or whispers. If your friends are really your friends, they'll understand when you get back to them later, explaining that you were teaching and weren't reading any telegrams right then. For much the same reason (too much delay giving the next instruction), I teach only one student at a time. I've taught two and three students together, but that really can turn into mass confusion, so I just don't do that anymore. One of the students almost always "catches on" more quickly than the other. The slower one sees how "easy" it is for the other one and begins to feel stupid. He or she may get so discouraged at not being able to "get it" that he decides this building stuff is just too difficult for him and gives up on the program. It's ok to tell the second one he is welcome to try to do the same things but that you just won't be able to talk to him while you're giving the lesson to the first one. Nothing beats one-on-one teaching, both to hold the interest of the fast student and to encourage the slow student. Even if a double lesson were to go fairly smoothly, it's not fair to keep one student waiting and waiting and waiting, while you're trying to help the other correct the inevitable mistakes each will make. Nor is it fair to neglect the slower student while you try to keep giving the faster student someting new to do. And it sure isn't fair to *you*, to wear yourself out trying to type so many different kinds of instructions at once. My suggestion is, teach 'em one at a time. Keep it fun for yourself, too! :)

Lesson Plans