A Whole New World?

In technology at McDowell, we are going through different stations of fun things to do with technology in Mr. Barne’s class. Each week you will go to a new station. One of the stations is virtual reality, also known as VR. We are lucky to have smartphones and virtual reality headsets here at McDowell for students to use. Anyways, if you didn’t know what virtual reality is, virtual reality is a 3D image/environment that can give you a realistic experience, but what do we use VR for here at McDowell?

The main reason we use VR is to “travel” to different places and use it to educate students. We use an app called “Google Expeditions” for our VR. In the Expeditions app, there are hundreds of different subjects/places you can “travel” to. With each expedition, there are descriptions about what is going on and it gives facts about what you’re seeing. In science class, we have used VR multiple times to help students learn. The first time we used virtual reality was to travel to different biomes, since in science we were working on biome projects. Then we used it to dive into the ocean, and we learned about how global warming causes coral bleaching. Finally, we also have used VR to travel up into the stratosphere. It helped students better understand what goes on in our atmosphere. You can also travel to many other famous landmarks or ancient places. It is a good way to learn visually and many students enjoy using virtual reality here at McDowell! What do you think about using virtual reality to learn?