Student Council
Welcome to my History VR Project webpage! I have set this site up so that I can share with fellow educators my experiences setting up and using Google Expedition in my classroom. All the equipment that I used was purchase by myself and the only resources that the school is contributing are electricity and a connection to the internet. (Most school districts would think twice before dropping $10K on a Google Expeditions classroom kit from Best Buy without knowing what it could do first!) I started with a $500 budget and this was what I was able to get:
What I needed was a tablet, a router and 27 vr headsets.
The tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1" Tablet Wi-Fi, White - 16GB with a 1.6 ghz quad core processor and 2GB of Ram $179.99 at Target
The router is an Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band WiFi router from Netgear. I purchased this at Staples on sale for $189.99
The Goggles are Onn Virtual Reality Smartphone Headsets. I was able to get these at $1.00 each for the first 17 from one Walmart store and $3.00 each for the last ten at a different Walmart location for a total of $47.00.
Students will use their own phones.
The Software is free from Google.
total cost $416.98
I also purchased a Samsung Gear 360 camera open box at Best Buy for $40.00 for later use.
Setup and test with students
Objectives: setup local network, unpack gear, download app to cellphones, attempt to conduct an expedition to a random location.
Setup of the router took about 10 minutes with most of the time spent waiting for updates to be downloaded and installed.
unpacking the goggles actually took the most time
used the Tour Creator editor from Google to create an expedition and published it at Poly.
Tour Creator is an extremely easy way to transform a 360 degree image into a tour. The downside... you must use Google Cardboard to view it. The upside is that Google has stated that in the near future you will be able to import the tours into Google expedition.
Here is a link to my first one scene tour. I set up by Gear 360 camera on a tripod in the middle of my classroom and using the bluetooth connection to my phone I snapped a picture from outside.
https://poly.google.com/u/0/view/7eWL_wM30RW
Here is a link to our classroom Studio where we film the morning announcements.