Making our own VR expeditions using a 360 camera

On a field trip to Salhus Tricotagefabrik, a local museum about the industrialization of Norway, we arranged to take pictures and film with our 360-camera. Salhus Tricotagefabrik was once a thriving factory producing cloth and garments from both wool and cotton. Some of our students dressed up in period costumes and re-enacted scenes that depicted work in the factory during the early 1900s. The students spent time in the museum reading about Norwegian labour history, and analyzed primary sources from a conflict between the workers' union and the fabric owners that took place in 1920. At the end of the day we gathered all our 60 or so students and re-enacted how members from the workers' union in Bergen came to Salhus to encourage the factory workers in Salhus to keep striking for better pay and working conditions in 1920. Our next task is to write "points of interest" for the VR-scenes we shot at the museum.

Heine and Kari

Using VR in language teaching

In addition to using VR in the history classroom, I (Kari) have also made a lesson plan for using VR in the language classroom, more specifically in my Spanish lessons. We had worked with the verb tense "indefinido" (simple past) in our Spanish lessons. The students were given the tasks that they were going to work with before entering the VR world and we looked at the questions and translated them to Norwegian. We also did a brainstorming of useful words/expressions that we thought we might need in order to describe the experience . The questions I asked the students were: Where did you go? What did you see? How was it? Did you like it? They had to answer these four questions for every scene they entered. You can find a copy of the task / questions below.

The students were given a set of VR glasses each and told to find the Expedition "Geography of South América". They could go from scene to scene and explore at their own pace and had to sum up in pairs afterwards, answering the questions.

A lot of students reported that they enjoyed the experience and that they could use a lot of their existing vocabulary, but they also managed to use new words. In addition, in our next assessment situation, the students were asked (in Spanish) what their favourite scene was, and they had to talk about this.

In conclusion, I see a great potential for using VR in language learning. The experiences the students get and the things they "see" seem to create a good basis for further communication in the foreign language and the VR experiences give us access to places which are normally out of our reach. I look forward to continue working with this project next year.

Kari

Demonstrating VR-teaching for European visitors

In week 19 our school hosted an Erasmus mobility. Teachers and students from Finland, Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal visited us for a week. 12 of our own Norwegian students joined our visitors and this international group of students had a wonderful time together, both at school and in their spare time! Part of the program was a VR-lesson about the Viking era and how the Vikings made an impact in our visitors' native countries. After a brief introduction, our visiting students and teachers explored the Viking world through the google expedition "Vikings" by Houghton and Mifflin. They were also encouraged to explore other expeditions that they might find interesting. Our visitors seemed particularly impressed by the expedition "Geography of South-America", which Kari has used in her Spanish lessons. Next on the agenda was a demonstration of our school's Oculus VR-glasses by our colleague Ann Kristin Vanem and some of her students in the education programme for healthcare. Our visitors had a VR-experience of the human heart and lungs in the Oculus- equipment. Very educational!

Heine

New lessons - The Great Wall of China

This VR lesson took place a while ago - I just haven't found the time to write about it before now.

For this VR lesson, we focused on making the experience simpler and less complicated than last time. Rather than telling a story while the students "walked around" in the virtual world, we let them explore the wall on their own terms. We told them to read the information provided of Google expeditions if they wanted, but they could also just spend their time looking at the wall and the surrounding scenery. When the students had finished their VR-tour we had a brief discussion in class about what they had experienced, before we handed out some questions to talk about in small groups. It should be noted that the students had worked with nomadic people (Genghis Khan) and dynasties before this expedition.

The students were asked to discuss questions in groups first, before talking about the questions in class.

The questions we asked were something along the lines of:

• What have you seen? (description) - Did you enjoy? Would you like to travel to the Great Wall of China?
• When was the wall built?
• Why was the wall built?
• Can you find examples of other walls in the world, built for the same reasons as the Great Wall of China?
• Do people still build walls today / want to build walls?

The students got to explore the wall and talked with each other during the expedition. I asked the students for some feedback after the session and here are some of their replies:

• "I liked that we got to go around on our own first, before working with the topic, this was easier than last time"
• "It was fun to work with tasks connected to the Wall after having seen it with my own eyes"
• "I liked the questions where we had to reflect on the building of walls today - this makes me motivated and makes me think"

All in all, this way of working with VR worked well for my class, and the students seemed to get more out of the experience this time than last time, which is positive.

Next post will be on how I used VR in my Spanish lesson, and how to incorporate grammar learning with the VR experience.

Kari

First lessons

Our first history lessons using VR-technology went surprisingly well! Having said that, we also made a few mistakes and learnt some valuable lessons. First of all, it is important to prepare the students well by going through how the VR-glasses work from a technical point of view before you even bring the students' glasses into the room. Secondly, we learnt that some students felt a bit dizzy from wearing the VR-glasses even after a few minutes. It is definitely important to plan for shorter expeditions, or to do one scene at a time and then have a break before continuing.

One successful practical arrangement was to hook up a pair of VR-glasses to the projector in the class room and give this pair to one of the students who has experience with VR. This way inexperienced students can lift their own glasses for a second to check if they are in the right scene etc. by looking at the screen in front of the classroom. (I guided Isak, the student who sits in front of the screen and it was fairly easy to keep everyone in the correct scene). Most students were fairly disciplined, but some of them got up from their chair to walk around. This is clearly not recommended and could be become something of a health and safety issue. It might be a good idea to have three or four students in the classroom who's job it is to prevent students from walking into objects or bumping into one another whilst wearing VR-glasses.

After the lessons were over, students gave us some immediate feedback that we found helpful. Most students felt that our stories were good and of a suitable length and that it advanced their learning. They told us that it is important to take our time telling our stories so that they can focus on both our voices and what they see in the VR-expeditions. Another piece of advice from out students was to directly reference what they see in their expedition rather than giving general information and telling stories whilst they are having their VR-experience.

We had finished all five scenes in our chosen expedition after about 50 minutes, including some shorter breaks. Most students reported that they enjoyed and learned from the experience, but they were happy to move on to more traditional teaching methods in the last section of our lesson. They spent the rest of the lesson researching the viking raids and answering tasks about the vikings that we had prepared for them. We look forward to our next venture into VR-teaching which is scheduled for mid-February.

Lesson plans for our VR experience

As teachers, we aim to catch our students attention by using various methods of teaching. Using VR glasses where students can enter historical places may be one way of getting their attention. However, since this is unknown territory, both for us as teachers and (most of) the students, there are many pitfalls connected to using VR in the classroom.

Because of this, when we first started planning our lesson plans, we were wanted to write stories connected to the viking age. We found several expeditions about the Vikings, and settled on an Expedition called "The Vikings" (Hougthon Mifflin Harcourt) to use. The idea was that the students would at the time of the VR lesson, have worked with the topic and they would have some background knowledge.

Our plan was to use story telling, as a way of guiding the students within the VR world. We would write these stories and include facts and descriptions. Initially, we wanted to write detailed stories, to keep the students' attention and guide them through the VR world.

However, as we have been working with this a while, we see that there are too many unknown factors to take into consideration and therefore, we have tried to keep our stories short for now - and perhaps at a later point, make them longer.

Our lesson plan consists of the following points:

• Introdution: Using the VR glasses;asking the students if they have downloaded the app, downloaded the correct expedition, talking about how to "behave" when having on the VR glasses (not move to much), about adjusting focus and where to find the menu and how to operate it.
• Let them know that they need to listen to the teacher and change scenes when given an instruction to do so (perhaps one of the most challenging points).
• Teacher reads the Viking stories, divided into 4 sub-topics with corresponding scenes; A Viking Raid (Lindisfarne), Viking trade, Inside a Viking Longhouse and Viking settlements.
• Students will be given some time to explore VR on their own.
• Working with tasks, connected to the stories and topic.

Tomorrow is the day we will carry out our lesson plans - we look really forward to it and we will write an evaluation of the lessons afterwards.

If you have any experience in using VR in the classroom, we would love to hear from you.

Check out our contact form below.

Why Google expeditions?

We have chosen to use the app Google expeditions for our VR project. There are several reasons for our choice.

1. We wanted to explore Virtual reality with two fairly big groups, 30 pupils in each. Because of this - the money we had at disposal for each pupil was limited. Google expeditions is an app which is free to download and use. The money we have will be used for VR glasses which can be used with smartphones. It was important to us that we could buy VR glasses so that every pupil could have a pair - so that we could make this an experience for everyone in the classroom at the same time.
2. We expect a worldwide company like Google to keep developing expeditions. In addition, we have the opportunity to make our own expeditions in time, if we manage to find time and resources for this.
3. Google expeditions seem to be easy to use. Though we see that we may have challenges to use the app with the Explorer / Guide mode (due to Wifi restrictions at school).

We are now in the process of writing stories to tell our students and will try out VR in the history classroom for the first time, next week. The "whys" and "hows" of our lesson plan will be elaborated upon in the next post.

Kari

The idea

In January 2018, a few colleagues of mine and myself attended BETT (British educacional training and technology show) in London and got to see what’s moving on the technological surface of the education world. We attended various lessons and got to try different types of equipment available on the market.

We became really fascinated by VR glasses. Just by putting them on, we could enter a completely different world and really "see" it (I walked around on the Chinese wall). We immediately felt that this was something we could bring back to our classrooms in Norway as a useful tool in our teaching and started talking about how we could make this work.

We applied for extra funding to move on with the project (from the county of Hordaland) and was granted money to proceed.

Now we are in the process of buying VR glasses for our pupils and exploring Expeditions (app from Google), which we decided to use.

To begin with, we would like to try out using VR glasses in our lessons of history, by taking the students into viking villages or other places that we talk about in our history lessons, perhaps combinded with lessons or story telling. At a later point, we may want to use VR in other subjects as well, like English and Spanish, or social subjects.

If you have any experience in using VR in the classroom, we would be very happy to hear from you. Please leave a comment - see the Contact form below.

Kari and Heine