Teaching in a Virtual Reality

For the 2016-2017 school year, The Educator's Room has joined a partnership with Mid-Pacific Institute, an independent private school that serves students in grades K-12 and is located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Throughout the year, various teachers, administrators, and stakeholders will share their experiences using the theme, "Learning in a Virtual Reality". To listen more to the partnership, click here for our podcast episode with Middle School Principal, Dwayne Priester. 

As the world of technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, it signals a call for K-12 educators also to hasten the rate at which their curriculum evolves to ensure that students within our care are poised to thrive in a changing world. With this in mind, ensuring that our instructional pedagogy is forward-facing requires the collective effort of educators who are willing to move beyond the silo approach to instruction. So it makes sense that Mid-Pacific has partnered with the Educator's Room around the use of Virtual Reality (V.R.) as one of many languages of technology, an essential aptitude for today's learner.

With a shift from textbooks, pencils, and pens the use of interactive technologies is designed to enhance the application of knowledge. This partnership with the Educator’s Room will highlight how our students in the Mid-Pacific Middle School are leveraging the power of virtual reality through newly developed courses such as Design Thinking, Studio Music, and Digital Storytelling. They are working closely with their teachers to apply relevant knowledge that they have learned in traditional course offerings. For example, rather than simply reading about the Greek Coliseum and looking at 2-dimensional pictures in a textbook, our middle school students are now able to wear the HTC Vive and experience the ruins in virtual reality. Science students interested in learning more about deep sea life can walk a simulated deck of a sunken vessel while observing the sights and sounds of sea life encircling them. For our students, the possibilities are limitless - these experiences of reality are all done within the walls of a classroom.

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Most recently, the middle school Advance Design Thinking students partnered with Catalog.Earth, a non-profit organization, dedicated to documenting the world's vanishing landscapes with a 360-degree video for free and public use. The published video will be uploaded to the Creative Commons License making it available to students worldwide to use for instructional purposes. Our students are the first and only educational partners with Catalog.Earth. They are pioneers in publishing 360-degree video capture.

Although virtual reality has been used as a training tool for graduate students, high tech professional organizations, and the military, it has not been widely embraced by K-12 schools. The Educator's Room has launched a bold initiative: Teaching In Virtual Reality, to spark an international dialogue as well as highlight the importance of V.R. as a tool to make instruction come alive.