Virtual Reality

“What is it like to walk in someone else's shoes? Books allow us to imagine it, and movies allow us to see it, but VR is the first medium that actually allows us to experience it.”
- Nick Mokey

Have you ever wanted to visit the moon or the inside of a NASA spaceship? Maybe you’re curious about ancient Mayan ruins or a historical war site? Or you are a visual learner that would benefit from seeing a living 3-D cell or organ system? Virtual reality gives many people the opportunity to experience these things and advance their learning, when they would normally not be able to.

In my “Intro to Instructional Technology for Educators” course at NCSU, we discussed Virtual Reality (VR) in the classroom. VR is a synthetic experience in a completely digital environment. When we first brought up the idea of teachers using virtual reality at schools I thought it was kind of crazy. I thought that virtual reality is too expensive to be used in classrooms and I had never seen a VR tool used for educational purposes. I couldn’t have been more wrong though. VR has the potential to greatly enhance learning, and would be a wonderful investment for our students. Currently, many VR glasses/goggles are fairly expensive, but as time goes on, the price of these tools will most likely decrease. It is possible that VR could be in every classroom the same way computers are in nearly every classroom today, even though they were once too expensive also.

However, even if the price of these VR tools remain high, there are less expensive options to engage in a VR world. You can check out the following website to find cost effective options to get VR headsets/ goggles in your classroom (https://news.elearninginside.com/5729-2/). Or, you can find an experience without using headsets! If you are like me, you probably typically associate virtual reality with the VR headsets you see in many technology stores, BUT there are so many more options to engage in virtual reality! For example, you can use your cell phone, laptop, tablet, or any other mobile device to take a tour of the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum using this website: https://hmlc.org/about-us/visit/virtual-tour/. Teachers can use tours like these to enhance their students' academic and cultural learning. There are many options for tours online, or you can make your own tour! This is the link to my cultural VR tour of San Antonio, Texas: https://poly.google.com/view/6cz5eT32cxT
I used Tour Creator (https://poly.google.com/view/6cz5eT32cxT) to create mine, and I would recommend it for others :)

After studying virtual reality more in my college classroom, I definitely see myself using it as a teacher. Specifically, as an elementary school teacher I see myself using this to teach my students about different cultures and holidays in different cultures. In my technology course, I used a VR headset to learn about Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Mexico, and it was an immersive and interesting tour that I would not have been able to visually experience otherwise. I can also use VR to teach other simple concepts like the solar system. Virtual reality makes learning fun and memorable! Students can learn about history, culture, and science from average textbooks, but a VR experience in these categories will not only be helpful for the visual learners in the class, it will also allow all students to connect the information they learned with a memorable electronic experience. Most students are interested in technology as it is (elementary to college level students), so incorporating VR will only keep them more engaged. There are many cost effective ways to use VR and there are tools available for teachers and students to create their own VR experience as well. I foresee more and more teachers using virtual reality in their classrooms in the future, and I can’t wait to see how this changes learning!

This article explains how VR drives deeper learning - academically, to push students to learn more, and culturally, to build empathy through experiencing different perspectives:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/virtual-reality-drive-deeper-learning-holly-korbey