Learning curves and technology are sisters. When working together, nothing can stop them and magic happens. But when either one of them wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, you’ll wish one of them was never born. Ok, that was an exaggeration, but you understand the metaphor.

At the start of the year I was given the duty of showcasing our school’s new VR headsets to our staff who trickled in and out of our technology session during in-service. We wanted to give them enough time to play, be able to show them how it works, and give them possibilities of how it can benefit their classrooms.

There are plenty of teachers out there who will be skeptical of this new tech, like any other. And for good reason.

“Let me get this right…I just figured out how to leverage iPads in the classroom and figure out how to hold students’ attention to the best of my ability, and you want me to allow them to throw these on their faces? Where I can’t see what they’re looking at?”

It was bad enough when a few departments came around and were only interested in riding a virtual rollercoaster. That in itself is enough ammunition for a cynic. But you have to give them ideas and you have to be ready to mow down the weeds.

So to arm myself against cynicism and give myself knowledge about the tech, I read as much as I could about it before our August in-service. I found a wonderful academic journal article from Themes in Science and Technology Education, about the use of VR in the classroom. It is titled, Reasons to Use Virtual Reality in Education and Training Courses and a Model When to Use Virtual Reality. You can download a copy of the .PDF reading here. It is under a CC license and readily found on the web.

Reasons to Use VR in Ed and Model to Determine when to use VR.

I think I need another blog post to talk about when this article suggested NOT to use VR, but basically the article had far more pros and cons for its’ use. With some more research, I created a list of ways that VR can be useful in an educational environment and had it on display at our in-service day. I think it was appreciated that we took the time to think about how this can be more for students than a nauseous roller-coaster ride or a virtual ping-pong table.

Purposes Included:

• Providing qualitative experiences
• Presenting abstract ideas
• Building empathy for others
• Collaboration with remote groups
• Can be highly motivating for students
• Stimulates learning comprehension
• Self-paced lesson possibilities
• Facilitates the development of spatial perspective
• Can help foster a sense-of-place
• New methods of visualization (being able to magnify, see above, see below)

Potential Uses Include:

• Field trips to places you can’t otherwise take students
• College recruiting and visits
• CSI Scenarios
• Conducting safe lab experiments
• Ability to reimagine places in different time periods (ancient Rome, Egypt)
• Ability to view historical imagery of places in different time periods (WWII scenes, then and now)
• Job trainings
• Virtual meetings
• Second language practice
• First responder training
• Tour environmental disasters
• Create immersive spaces
• View or participate in surgical theaters
• Autism therapies
• VR relate career; app development
• Architectural design
• Urban planning
• Flight simulations
• Replicate dangerous scenarios (use with caution)

My school purchased Lenovo Daydreams, which are wireless and are not tethered to a computer. This allows students the ability to move around, sit in their own seats, and not have to fiddle with swapping their phones in and out of headsets.

Within the first four weeks, I seem to be the only teacher checking these out (we have a rolling cart of 16, with another 16 on backorder). And while I am currently enjoying being the sole user, I know it won’t last for long.

So far, the virtual reality headsets are a huge hit with students, and you should have seen the faces at parent’s night (in a good way).  Granted, there are a few students who opt to use their iPad for a lesson due to motion-sick symptoms, but the educational value of the lesson is not diminished when on the iPads.

I will stress that I understand how incredibly fortunate our students are to leverage this technology, but even if you don’t have access to headsets, do yourself a favor and have students download Google Expeditions ASAP. If you are in BYOD (bring your own device) school, the only hiccup might be that it requires you are all on the same wifi.

As far as the tech curmudgeon who always says that tech fails them, 9/10 times it is user error (ok maybe 8), and a lack of effort to troubleshoot. Frankly, you get better at troubleshooting the more you troubleshoot, so I can empathize with those who don’t like that cup of tea.  But I want to be able to help my fellow teacher bring this tech to their lessons, because I think there is real value here. I am still in the position of testing this tech out with my students when time allows so that I can work out the kinks and understand the variables that contribute to dropped wifi signals, and the logistics of how to reconnect to an app (Expeditions) when that happens. I ran a few Google Expeditions with students throughout the last three weeks and experienced some dropping with the inability to jump back in to the app easily via the headsets.

Thankfully, our wifi and tech staff are amazing at what they do and I had one of our tech guys sit in my classroom this week to help me monitor the wifi usage during my lesson. From the experience, I’ve learned not to simultaneously airplay my iPad during VR use, turn of Chromecast connections, and to have kids kill the Expedition app on their iPads if they are also using headsets. All of these things helped with the connection and I’m happy to say that my Google Expedition that I ran 5th and 8th hours did not drop.

Some of that may have sounded obvious to you, but whenever you teach kids to learn new tech, you have to show them first. So initially, I air-played my iPad to show them how to navigate Expeditions and how to join (not guide) a tour. You would be surprised at how many messed this up. After they learned how to use the Expedition app on their iPads, I AV-sourced over to my Chromecast and projected my Lenovo headset on the projector to show the entire class how to navigate into the Expeditions app and join a tour that a guide starts (without having dropped my iPad projection). With all of this combined, it zapped the signal in the room and my kids headsets were then jumping over to the next classroom’s wifi box. In doing so, their signals dropped from the Expedition and it was very difficult to get them back without restarting the headsets and my Expedition.

I will aim to do at least one Expedition or VR application per week and report back. In the meantime, do yourself a giant favor and download Google Expeditions, it’s the next big thing. It’s going to be huge.