Week 14: Infused Classroom- VR Experiences

 This week I looked at Holly Clark's blog Infused Classroom and her review of virtual backgrounds.  

What are VR experiences? 

If you are like me VR feels like a topic that only tech savvy teachers can integrate. However, in her blog Holly Clark gave suggestions for how to make it possible in your classroom! Clark states that, "Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that opens the door to the wider real world"(Clark, 2021). Incorporating this into your classroom can ignite curiosity in students and increase classroom engagement. In addition it opens up opportunities to expose your students to different places, cultures and things. Clark, also helped me see that I don't need a ton of money to make a VR experience happen. Below a some steps you can take to integrate VR. 
  1. Get a class set or enough for a small group of cardboard. This is how you can create the VR googles for relatively cheap. 
  2. Need to find devices. Teachers could use iPads or an iPhone. If your school does not have access to those things you could ask parents to come in and support this experience with their iPhone. 
  3. Download the free Expeditions app to all the devices you are using and make sure they are on the same wifi! 
  4. Pick the expedition you would like your students to go on and then they are ready to explore!
If I had known it was this easy I would have looked into VR a long time ago. 


 Can I use VR experiences in my classroom? 

There are a few ways teachers can use VR experiences in the classroom. The first way is why you are launching a new unit of study. In my class I teach a social studies unit on different regions in the U.S. This VR experience would be great to expose my students to what the different regions look like geographically. 




In addition Clark suggests using VR to bring "old style" reports to life! One tool she suggested was Tour Creator VR. On this site students can log into their Google account and create their own tour of a place they are researching. They then can share their tour with their classmates. There is a lot of possibilities with Tour Creator including adding a Mp3 file and allowing students to act as a "tour guide" during their expedition. Teachers always want their students excited about what they are doing. Integrating VR can be a great place to start! 

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