VR Reflection

I really did not know much about virtual reality before this week of researching it. It has been a very enlightening week of research. The most important aspect of my research this week was defining virtual reality. There are many different kinds of virtual reality available and finding the kind that could even plausibly work in schools is important. So discussions with my peers in education helped me form my definition and shape what my perspective of virtual reality is.

Virtual reality in schools is like using videos and projectors and virtual field trips in the classroom. In many other industries virtual reality entails using special equipment, gloves, helmets, vehicles, and rooms.  This kind of virtual reality is just not plausible in a school setting. It costs too much and is too difficult to maintain. But there are plenty of options for educators to incorporate virtual reality into their classrooms.

I think that virtual reality (school style virtual reality) is completely attainable in a classroom. I think that it could be helpful to show students things they wouldn’t be able to see normally. However, I think the word of the day is balance. All throughout teaching we are constantly doing a circus-like balancing act. Kids need hands on experiences, but they also need technology instruction. As long as you aren’t only teaching one specific way, using virtual reality as a teaching tool is totally acceptable.

Virtual worlds are neither better nor worse than real life experiences when judging your teaching. They are just different. If virtual reality is allowing students to experience something totally new that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience, then that is a great teaching tool. If the real life hands on experience is available, I would do that first however.

I think that as society we have made virtual reality a game. Im not saying that games can’t be learning experience though. So I think what we need to do as educators is not get students to view virtual reality as a learning experience. We need them to view everything as a learning experience and see the learning in everything, even video games. As humans we are constantly learning things from our environment. We can learn from everything we do, as long as we have a life-long-learning mindset. It is that mindset that we need to adjust in not only children, but everyone in society.

Virtual Reality Websites

Mount Everest- middle school

http://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=Everest-Nepal

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History- Elementary

http://www.mnh.si.edu/vtp/1-desktop/

Google Lit Trips- High school

http://googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/Home.html

Google Earth- middle school

http://www.google.com/earth/index.html

Spacecraft 3-D iPad app- elementary

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id541089908?mt=8

The first virtual reality website I found is about Mount Everest.

http://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=Everest-Nepal

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.

The Other Side of the VR Debate

Researching both sides of this argument was very enlightening. I discovered plenty of information that surprised me greatly.

I have determined that I am both for and against using virtual reality systems in the classroom. This being the case, I have decided that the opposing view I will choose is con-virtual reality (since I am mostly in favor of virtual experiences.)

I think first of all a definition of virtual reality needs to be maintained. When I think of virtual reality, especially in a school setting, I think of virtual field trips or websites I can visit with my students. Many of the articles I read address virtual reality as complete submersion into the virtual world via special equipment such as gloves, headsets, or even whole virtual rooms. I think that there is really no feasible way that schools are going to be able to do that on nearly the same level any time in the near future due to lack of funding or necessity. So when I discuss cons of virtual reality in schools, I am referring to the former.

One of the main disadvantages to virtual reality situations is the lack of socialization. Many people nowadays prefer texting or emailing to speaking face to face. Is this boom in technology creating socially inept adults that do not know how to interact with their peers in real situations?

Trainings and simulations could never be exactly like the real world. Much of what I teach in third grade is preparing students for real life. This brings us to another disadvantage: desensitization. If students spend too much time in virtual worlds, especially at early ages, they could possibly begin to confuse reality with their virtual reality. Take the computer simulation game The Sims, for example. Students create families and then control how they live their lives. The student might choose to not feed the dog, and the dog dies. But then a few clicks gets the dog back, or a new one in its place. We do not want students thinking that this is how real life works, or that there are no consequences for their actions because there are always consequences.

People often take this previous example to the extreme that violent video games cause children to show violent behavior. There is a lot of research on both sides of this argument, but there is physical proof that playing these games has a significant physiological impact on the person playing.

        Another interesting fact I came across is that researchers say virtual reality is an attempt to eliminate the traditional distinction between the user and the machine. If anyone has seen a sci-fi thriller movie where robots or machines are trying to take over the world, this is usually how it started.

        Students need real life and hands on learning experiences to prepare them for the real world, not the virtual world, no matter how similar the two might be.

Citations

Aryamoorti. (2011, March). Virtual reality. Retrieved July 27, 2013, from Study Mode website: http://www.studymode.com/essays/Virtual-Reality-602929.html 

Bilawchuk, A. (2004, March 26). What are the social implications of VR? Retrieved July 27, 2013, from http://www.bilawchuk.com/mark/prosandcons.html 

Eugene, P. (2013, April 30). What are the disadvantages of virtual reality? (B. Angela, Ed.). Retrieved July 27, 2013, from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-disadvantages-of-virtual-reality.htm 

Rokkitman88. (2008, September 15). Can virtual reality kill? Retrieved July 27, 2013, from http://www.allfreeessays.com/essays/Can-Virtual-Reality-Kill/3548.html

What is Virtual Reality?

This is dictionary.com’s definition of virtual reality:

 virtual reality- noun

a realistic simulation of an environment, including three-dimensional graphics, by a computer system using interactive software and hardware.

Virtual Reality is also knows as a computer simulated environment and artificial reality.  

In all of my research, virtual reality seems to hinge on the fact that a computer of some kind is necessary, restricting this kind of technology to the early information age and later. As the years go by, better and more advanced virtual reality software is being developed. The first example of virtual reality that comes to mind is Walt Disney World. The technology at Disney parks is actually quite advanced and innovative and they have several attractions that use virtual reality such as Sorin Over California. In this simulation you are in a hang glider in front of a giant movie screen to make you feel like you are actually hang gliding. Movement of the ride vehicle, breezes, and scents add to the reality of the simulation and make it feel like you are really there. That is the purpose of virtual reality.

            In my educational setting virtual reality is hardly being used at all. We do a lot of activities in my classroom that involve imagination and pretending we are experiencing something different. (You might say imagination is the low-tech forerunner of virtual reality.) We also watch a lot of videos and do virtual field trips, but because these just give information and don’t really make you feel like you’re there, I do not think they count as virtual reality. That kind of technology is just not readily available in a school setting.

            I am both for and against virtual reality. I think that if virtual reality creates educational opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable to students, then it is a good thing. However, all educational experiences should not be replaced with virtual reality. We don’t want our actual reality to become completely virtual. With the way our technology is going this has already starting to happen (people would rather text than speak face to face. It’s really cool that students can have a deeper conversation by typing on Cover It Live, but is this inhibiting their ability to have a face to face group discussion?)