First up is a Virtual Make Poverty History Concert held at Melbourne Grammar School as part of their annual Leadership Conference.
The week after this virtual concert I went to Sydney with a group of students for the Skoolaborate Congress.
Using machinima characters to tell stories is a great way of getting kids to document events, we did the following one a couple of weeks after the conference. It allows kids to add a personal and creative touch without exposing themselves too much.
The background is a simple image slideshow(easily done in Sony Vegas, you can automate the import effects and transition times etc.). The foreground has the Second Life avatars of the kids, originally filmed in front of a virtual green screen whilst speaking jibberish into a mic to get the speech animations happening. The voices we recorded in a stairwell on a mobile phone - the only place in the school we could find some peace.
Here is what the workshop I was helping facilitate at the conference in Sydney produced. Students from New Zealand and Australia(and teachers from Australia, US and NZ) worked together to create this virtual news report.
