21st Century Educator

The OpenSimulator is great, but unfortunately it was written for adults in mind.  One of the options available all over the place is "Take Off" which basically means to take off the given item of clothing.  This means if install this program as is on your school's servers, you just installed something which allows students to view porn on the school's computers.  Ouch!

Fortunately there is a solution.  The Hippo viewer uses a series of XML files to create it's menus.  If you go into 'C:\Program Files\Hippo_OpenSim_Viewer\skins\default\xui' (or a similar location based on where you installed the program and what operating system you are using) you can find the XML files which define the menus.  Simply go through them (use find "Take Off" in your text editor) you can safely remove all of the options for removing clothing from every menu. Whew, lots of work, and easy to mess up, but at least it works.

Before you make any changes, make a backup of your installation (just make a copy of the whole program with extra files somewhere else on your computer, like in your 'My Documents' folder).  Basically to get this to work you have to find the folder 'default' in C:\Program Files\Hippo_OpenSim_Viewer\skins and replace it with the contents of this zip file.  You also want to delete the 'Silver' folder from the skins directory so the students can't switch to a theme with the buttons we don't want.  Note that if you upgrade this program, you'll have to repeat these steps.

It's not foolproof, but it seems to be very stable and I have happily tested that the buttons and menu items which let users remove their clothing are now gone.

• David Wees's blog

About David

David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.