Hi everybody and welcome to our weekly meeting. I'm glad you made it.

For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Nergiz Kern in real life and I teach English and sometimes also German and Turkish.Let me give you briefly an overview of how these

meeting started and what our intention is.

While doing this, I will use one of the educational tools I want to show you today, the SpeakEasy HUD (Heads-UpDisplay).

So, just in case you wonder how I type so fast while talking to you at the same time :)

The text is pre-typed and stored in a note-card. With each click on the HUD, the next sentence comes up in local chat. But more about that later.

So, It was actually Maru's idea to meet regularly after our first such meeting, we had several. Then Alicia joined us.

The wiki was a logical step to collect all the useful ideas that came up in the meetings and also as an asynchronous communication platform, to avoid sending e-mails back and forth.

At the SLanguages conference and in other discussions about teaching languages in SL, we heard people asking whether such a platform existed.

So we decided to open our wiki and the meetings up to more educators. And I believe this will be beneficial for us and for all participants.

Our wiki is for language teachers and the main aim is sharing lesson ideas and plans.

Sharing lesson ideas and plans is actually the core of the wiki, complemented by all the other resources, like collections of landmarks, SL skills and other resources.

I often heard SL teachers say, that lesson planning takes much more time than in RL.

We don't have that much extra time. So collaboration is really the key here.

It is also time-consuming for the experts in SL (not me) because they have to explain the same things over and over again.

With the wiki and the meetings, there is a platform where they explain things once to many.

As I said, there are many resources out there.

I added two links to the wiki that I'd like to point out here again.The first one is a podcast produced by Linden Lab with a longer

chat about Education in SL with many useful tips and links. You can find the link on the "Other Resources" page on the wiki.

The second one is a link to a place with very comprehensive tutorials to learn about Second LIfe skills. The information is available in different languages which you choose at the beginning of the tour (a HUD to wear).

I was told that this place belongs Linden Lab training their staff. Find the link on the wiki pages "SL Skills" (top) and "Other resources".

And that's the end of my talk :)