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Canadian public school and post-secondary teachers are using Web 2.0 sites and technologies to engage students and help them pick up real life skills and experiences.

One educator doing this in a big way is Ken Hudson, managing director of the Virtual World Design Centre at Loyalist College in Belleville Ont.

Hudson shared his experiences on Tuesday at a panel on Web 2.0 and learning at "Powering Innovation", a national summit held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto.

Held over two days, the summit brought together innovators in science, research, education and IT from Canada and across the world to discuss and showcase technologies that are transforming the way we conduct research, collaborate, teach and learn.

Hudson said he was hired by Loyalist College two years ago to bring the benefits of innovative technologies to the institute. The most obvious way to do this, he said, was to delve into the virtual world.

"Virtual worlds have been used as training environments for many years," Hudson said. "In the past 30 years, if you've ever flown on an airplane, the pilot was probably trained in a virtual world – on a simulator."

Hudson calls it "practice in a non-threatening environment."

And one such environment that Hudson has used extensively to train his own students is Second Life, a 3-D virtual world created by its "residents", where users can socialize, connect and create using voice and text chat.

Read about how Hudson has turned Loyalist's Second Life experience into a business: Canadian college turns virtual world creation into real business venture

Second Life's world – called "the grid" – is divided into 256x256m areas of land, called Regions or Sims, short for "Simulators".

Hudson said he purchased two Sims in Second Life and on it built a life-like replica of Loyalist College.

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