Four Questions with Hall Davidson, Discovery Educator Network Director

1. Where are we and what are we doing today?
Hi, I’m Hall Davidson with Discovery Education and we are at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. We have gathered 150 of the best early adopters, sharing teachers, K-12, technologic coordinators, some people in the district level. They spend a week, they share, they drink up each other’s knowledge. It’s a fantastic time to be around great teachers.
2. How are you seeing AR and VR being used in the classroom?
I see AR and VR being used in the classroom a lot right now. I’ll give you some examples, but I also see it being used a whole lot more as a technology evolving and it’s evolving very quickly. So I’ve seen it used with special education classes in high school, and with social studies classes. We’ve seen fantastic results with a group of students that need every advantage that technology can give them.
I’ve seen it with second language learners in Texas, where a great teacher used it with his students and then the whole district said, “It’s just so fantastic we have to do it.”
The career related aspects of it are huge, the training aspects of it are huge. It’s the ability to add on to what print can do for instructions, for technical manuals, for difficult manual tasks, from welding to constructing parts at industrial companies, are fantastic. And those are happening right now. What we’re going to see in the future is more contact built into AR and VR. Meaning, the things that teachers are supposed to be teaching now, those subject areas being led into with both AR and VR. AR particularly, has the great ability to go with you through your mobile device and carry knowledge with you. That’s just going to be an ongoing thing from now on.
3. What outcomes have you witnessed that people have been able to achieve with AR and VR?
Let me just say one thing about MERGE Cube. The wonderful thing about MERGE Cube, is that it works really well with human beings.We are a handed species, we have left hands and right hands, how can that be? Because the brain talks really coherently to the hand. So when we manipulate things with hands (there is a lot of good data on this) we learn in a better way and a deeper way.
Not only is it more profound but I think sometimes it’s easier. Engineers that work with their hands are better at solving problems than ones that don’t. When cars became digital, it was a real loss because one things that engineers get used to doing is work on their cars and now it’s more difficult to do that. The ability to return hands to the thinking process is huge.
[AR technology gives us] the ability to tell stories, learn about anatomy, or to discover things about places we haven’t been. This way, does something at the level of here to here (points to hand and to brain) that AR by itself really doesn’t do. That’s why I really like the MERGE Cube.
We did a state project in Texas where students all over the state sent us in augmentations that we used in a book to turn a social studies book into a STEM book. It’s fantastic. With VR, we’re just getting to the level where we’re really going to see the fantastic stuff for empathy, for mindfulness, the ability to go to different places, and the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes in a meaningful way. Whether you are a person with dyslexia, or a person that has certain ways to react with the world, to walk in their shoes, to be in a different country a different culture, is going to be just huge. Walking in somebody’s shoes can be the same for an endangered species, or a tree, or a molecule. Hydrogen molecule, “Hey! Where did I come from?” So, lots of very cool stuff there and I just can’t wait for the next five years.
4. Lastly, what recommendations do you for educators thinking about bringing AR and VR into the classroom?
When you lead a curriculum-rich environment like DENSI is, the first step is to explore a little bit with the tools itself. But, the critical part for teachers is to find a lesson — something you’re supposed to be teaching and find the way that augmented reality or virtual reality can help do that. It can help either introduce the learning or cement the learning. There are lots of ways to do that…and those will be explored. Teachers at DENSI for example will be the great explorers to see how this works. It has to tie to something you’re trying to teach. But the beauty of these two new realities is they do that very well.
So you have to relax little bit, learn the tools, and then some night go, “OH! You know what I could do? I could make our students talk to all the posters. Hey, I could animate the district logo so that it does something and talks about learning so that anybody with a mobile phone that follows our channel can do that. Or, virtual reality in the spaces on the safety outside the schools.” Lots of ways to do it we just have to think about that. When we have kids that needed time to think, maybe we can put them in a place like a beach or a butterfly garden or in a tropical forest. We just have to think about problems we have now and say, “Will this new reality, virtual reality or augmented reality, can it help me in a certain way and really find that?”. Not just playing, but really finding learning objectives and saying, “This could really help me with that.”
The potential for AR and VR in the classroom seems to be limited only by the imagination of the educators using it. For teachers contemplating how to approach AR and VR in the classroom, consider joining the MERGE Educator group on Facebook where almost 3,000 educators are sharing best practices — or contact our EDU team (https://edu.mergevr.com).
