Teacher Spotlight: Bring Education to Life with Metaverse
Words by: Blake Johns. Instructional Technology Specialist, Ware County, Georgia @Blake_Johns
When I first came across the Metaverse app, back in July 2017, I thought to myself, “This is cool, I’ll show this to some students and let them play around.” I played with the Google Vision integrations and camera scenes, but once school started back up, I didn’t have the time to explore it further. Then, in October, I came across a tutorial on building digital breakouts in Metaverse and my mind started racing thinking how I could use this in the classroom. I thought about how students could use a breakout experience to test their knowledge after they had completed a lesson. Or they could use 360 photo and video scenes in Metaverse to transport them around the world, both in the past and the present, on virtual field trips.
The idea that most excited me, however, was to let students actually build their own experiences to showcase their knowledge. Students could bring to life the characters from a story in order to demonstrate comprehension. They could create their own virtual tour of places from a book, or create a tour of battles throughout history. Students are able to quickly get up and running, creating experiences to teach their peers about content in their own words and in their own style, without getting caught up spending too much time learning how to use the software. The Metaverse platform sets them up with a foundation to start understanding coding and the coding process. Below you can see a glimpse of how I used Metaverse to teach students the difference between ionic and covalent bonds. It features Isaac Newton working with Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Now, with the ability to copy experiences, and search and clone other users’ experiences, this platform has become an excellent resource to educators. It also has the ability to import 3D Google Poly objects with a single click, and this will surely amaze your students.
There are three things that all instructional technology tools need to have: they need to be innovative, they need to be easy, and they need to be free. Metaverse hits all three of these, and every teacher should give Metaverse a chance to be a part of their instruction. Teachers, if you want to be part of the next trend in educational technology, you should give Metaverse a whirl. Become part of a growing community of innovative educators, whom I like to refer as MetaMates. Happy Metaversing!
If you would like to be a featured teacher, please email: jonathan@gometa.io
