Mount
Everest- middle school
Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History- Elementary
Google
Lit Trips- High school
Google
Earth- middle school
Spacecraft 3-D iPad app- elementary
The
first virtual reality website I found is about Mount Everest.
This website is an aerial panorama gallery of many different places. The
Mount Everest one I chose to look at has a map of the entire are Everest
resides in. You can click on several different spots along the journey up
Everest to see panoramic videos. Some places include the area airport, cities,
and different spots up the mountain itself. You can’t control where the video
moves, but you can click on things inside the video for more information. In
the video for Everest base camp you can see who the tents belong to, what the
surrounding mountains are, and views from different heights. There is even
music playing to make you feel like you are there. The creator of the site also
wrote many notes about creating the panorama of Everest and the whole
experience to add to the realistic feeling.
While
you could do different activities with a variety of age ranges, the age that
would most benefit from this site is middle school. If they happen to be
studying Mount Everest, or reading about Mount Everest, this site would give
excellent background knowledge and give the students a better idea about what
they are reading. One activity they could do is keep a journal as if they
themselves were making the trek up Mount Everest. They could use this site to
follow the map and write descriptions of the scenery they are seeing on their
“trip.” The objective would be I can write a journal using good descriptive
words to show and not tell.
This is a very easy site to use. The panoramas
are just videos you play and then watch and you can click things along the way.
I do not think that middle school students would have any trouble navigating
this site once I showed them initially.
Another virtual reality site I came
across is a website for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History. http://www.mnh.si.edu/vtp/1-desktop/
This
site puts you right in the middle of the museum and allows you to explore as if
you were really there. This is a fantastic site for me because a trip to this
museum with my students would never be possible because of my location. On the
site you get to control where you look. You can change directions, change
floors and zoom in and out. You can look at many different museum exhibits
including the museum gift shop.
There are also a variety of activities
that can be done with this site, but I think that my elementary students would
most benefit from it. The objective would be I can navigate the museum website
and take notes on a topic that interests me. Students would explore freely and
choose a topic. That makes this more of an inquiry project and lets the
students have the freedom to pick what they want to learn about. This is a very
easy site to use and I think my third graders would be able to navigate it and
figure it out themselves once I got them to the site. I would want to spend
several lessons exploring this site, but only one lesson would be needed to
instruct students on how to manipulate the site.
The third site I explored using virtual
reality is an iPad application called Spacecraft 3-D. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id541089908?mt=8
I was
completely amazed by this site when I first came across it. First you print out
a worksheet containing a “marker.” Then you launch the app, place the marker on
a desk and point your iPad’s camera at the marker. Where the marker is sitting,
a 3-D image of a satellite will appear. You can choose many different satellites
to look at and some you can even manipulate. The Curiosity lets you rotate the
craft, extend the arm and the mast. While I think that older students studying
the specific pieces of spacecraft could use this app, My elementary students
would absolutely love it if there appeared to be a satellite sitting on my
desk. This would engage them and get them excited to learn about space. The
learning objective would be I can describe a satellite and explain what they
do. We could look at the satellites together as a class, or I could print a
class set of the markers and let the students explore on their own.
This was also a super easy app to use.
Once you have used it once it is easy to replicate the instructions. You also
only need to print the marker once and one marker works for all the satellites.
I anticipate my students will be able to use this within one class period.
No comments:
Post a Comment