Virtual Reality can take students out of the classroom and into entirely new lands, environments and experiences — from global travel to outer space — and it is primed to be the next big learning opportunity to integrate into the learning environment. (The ‘New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology’ report published by the World Economic Forum identified VR as a key opportunity for technology to be used in the advancement of social and emotional learning [SEL].)
There is a wealth of fantastic, educational material available for students to immerse themselves in, and I’ve been getting to grips with that from Discovery VR, the Natural History Museum, London (which I’ve previously written about here).
For a recent post on Discovery Education’s community blog, I looked at vEcotourism, which offers virtual tours across the globe to see endangered wildlife in their natural environments. They have recently introduced a new ‘kid’s version’ of their Mount Elgon virtual reality tour to visit the world’s only salt-mining elephants.
This particular version is narrated by children and has been trialled in classrooms alongside project work to ‘adopt’ some of their other tour locations, challenging students to research the habitats and the species that live within them, and produce their own voice-over narration.
