Hello All,
For the past 14 years or so, not only have I been working as an IT Technician in a local secondary School, but I've also been running an opensimulator (opensim) grid (not school or work related). For those of you not familiar with opensimulator (OpenSimulator), essentially its a cross platform opensource alternative to SecondLife. I know some universities in UK and the States use it as a remote learning facility for their learners.
As I've been an un-official tester for the opensimulator project over a long period, I've seen a good deal of development and growth as the popularity of the software has grown. I've also been instrumental in setting up opensim grids both for friends and on a semi professional basis for commercial grids.
I'm still of the opinion that in a school environment, opensimulator offers some unique and comprehensive features such as collaborative working, and could be beneficial across a range of subjects of the school syllabus.
Certainly, from a technical perspective it touches a lot of complex and interlinked areas of IT/Computer Science, such as Server/Client architecture, Networking, firewall rules/policies, database administration, web server deployment and use, code compilation, network and database security as well as many others.
As a spin off from running and administering an opensim grid, I also teach blender to other opensim users at a beginner and intermediate level. This is primarily because opensim allows the importing of mesh, images and sound. Once opensim users have got the hang of Blender, they can then create and import things into their own simulators (sims).
When I was attempting to persuade the school it was worthwhile running opensim for students to use, I also looked at possible ways to integrate it into some of the subjects and school syllabus. Some of the ideas generated were, Use as a virtual walk through, for the school buildings/layouts/facilities, use as a virtual art gallery, where students can show off their artwork, helping learners learn basic maths, ie. volume, areas, use in computing, as learners can learn to script in LSL (linden scripting language) and in doing so, they can see the results of their scripts working,or not in-world
I'd be more than pleased to answer any questions you may have about the above, also I'd be pleased to hear your thoughts on the matter