When Textbooks Come To Life!
Have you ever found yourself bored in class? Maybe your not able to focus, or you keep staring at the clock wondering when will this end? Many of us find ourselves in this position more often than we would like. It isn’t the material fault, that is presented to us by our teachers, but in fact the way our educational system delivers that material. Textbooks are the basis for education in our school systems, and as technology advances, our ways in the classroom do not. Even with schools integrating more and more computers into their libraries, we are still stuck reading the same textbook except this time from a lit screen.
There Is Hope!
With virtual reality becoming increasingly popular over the past couple of years, we are starting to see the technology used for virtual reality spread into different branches of use besides it’s original intent, which was for video games. Now imagine reading a history textbook and looking at the words quoting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, would you feel more impacted by his speech seeing him in person, front row to the stage where Lincoln delivered The Gettysburg Address? Of course you would! Words on a page simply can not match up to a real life experience when it comes to learning and knowledge.
VR Compliments The Classroom.
Virtual Reality seems like a great way to get more kids engaged in their classroom material! However, this doesn’t mean it is going to completely take over our educational systems. Subjects like math for example could simply still be taught on a white board since there isn’t a real “situation” to experience with numbers. In short, virtual reality will prove to serve best as an addition to our current education rather than a complete substitute.
VR technology would probably be of most use in classes such as history, where kids can relive major events, or English where students may travel into the world of a classic novel and experience it for themselves. These immersive realities are sure to grab the attention of students and get them more involved in the classroom. In a CNN Post by Emma Kennedy, she quotes Guido Kovalskys who said “We see a direct correlation between VR usage and increased engagement by students”. (2018) In other words, VR is trying to grab the attention of these students, and it is working.
So Where Are My School’s VR Headsets?
These technologies are still in the early stages of development with a great lack of apps for the headsets that involve educational material. In time there will be more softwares and technologies developed to help supplement virtual reality into the classroom experience, we just have to be patient. Emma Kennedy also quotes in her post Chian Gong, a principle at Reach Capital, a firm that helps develop educational startups. Chian Gong states that there is a problem getting VR headsets into the classroom and “That’s partly because of access to devices but also because there’s a lack of available quality content”. (2018) Meaning the headsets are not only expensive for every school to invests in them, but also there is just not enough software for the headsets based toward education for schools to invest in virtual reality yet. Hopefully we can see this change in the near future!
Citations
Kennedy, E. (2018, November 1). Can virtual reality revolutionize education. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/01/health/virtual-reality-education/index.html
