Getting started with Virtual reality

Melbourne University send a box of cardboard VR viewers to our careers teacher and she did not need that many. This was the start of something wonderful. 

I grabbed that box and put the call out for anyone who wanted to do go on an in-cursion - a deliberately vague invite that got zero responses. So then I tried again, however this time I looked at the curriculum in Years 7 & 8 and invited specific people to come along. 

Thus the Year 7 HUMS team an Head of Faculty were the first to jump into VR. They were studying natural disasters so wha better way to get students to understand the impact of these then to immerse them into some! These were the videos we selected;

Students were spoken to a few lessons prior and invited to bring along their smart phone with the fee App Youtube   installed and headphones. We also looked at what VR is and how it works in this front loading session - see below for slides.

Up next we partnered the students up whilst one was immersed the other acted as a spotter to keep them safe and then we swapped over. This also aided those students who did not have  a smart phone to access the VR world. Afterwards the teacher led a discussion and reflective piece to camera task drawing together the geographical and emotional impact of the events.  The immersion helped the students see, hear and feel the events developing empathy and they gained previously unavailable insight into the widespread geographical impact. Not bad for a free box of cardboard headsets! 

This also led to a teacher from the same team taking the idea and applying with me as a coach in her Year 11 LOTE class where students selected a Spanish speaking capital city and through Google streetview explored the neighbourhood providing information to a peer, refining their conversational and direction Spanish speaking skills as they explored a world they may not have seen before. See the slideshow to the left for details.