What Educators need to know about Virtual Reality now

As we continue to develop our Tech Hub we have included two HTC VIVE sets. We open this to classes (booked by the teacher) for use and during lunchtimes for Student bookings.
As you can imagine there was great demand and waiting lists to begin with and now we are seeing the same students booking every week or two.

As a leader in digital learning I am doing what I can to source VR experiences, and as Steven quite rightly says is that these experiences don’ t have much of the “replay” appeal and other than the 360 experience it is not really something that couldn’t be experienced on a flat screen with a great deal less cost involved.

Don’t get me wrong…I love the VR experience and I have seen some students experience things that they would never be able to experience in real life. One student who is wheelchair bound has journeyed to places in outer space, climbed Mount Everest and will soon walk the Kakoda Track (we have just downloaded this Australian Experience.

As I read through this article I was thinking about a conversation I recently had with some IT students. They are about to embark on their senior studies, and as we are a rural school the subjects that run are those with the most students applying for them and these students were ‘out-voted’ for their subjects and in the upcoming school year 3 Digital media, programming and technology courses will be dropped from the curriculum. As you can imagine this news for these dedicated students was very upsetting and traumatic. One is now considering dropping out of school completely to pursue their passion of digital media, programming and technology just because as a school the decision has been made not to run these courses.

This article has given me inspiration to support these students and their teachers to use VR creation tools to develop digital resources that will comply with the needs of their courses whilst still enabling them to develop digital media and programming skills they are so passionate about.

Thank you for this article and the suggestions you have included to make VR a tool for all educators and learners.
Rachael

Immersive Tech in Education

1, Educate yourself.  Read and have a conversation about VR.  There are plenty of resources available, do your own research and due diligence into the value of VR in education.

2, Experiment.  Yes we’ve all heard of it, Google Expeditions.  I do see value with expeditions especially since it’s free and available on both Android and iOS.  All you need is a cardboard sleeve, a capable mobile device and you’re set to experience VR.

3, Dream.  VR is not yet ready for widespread K12 adoption due to barriers such as cost and limited content however there are a growing number of appropriate VR experiences that can be used in the classroom.

Shout out to all my colleagues, see links at the end of this article, who are taking thoughtful steps to appropriately integrate VR into their curriculum.  Your efforts are integral to the success of VR as a trans formative…

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