K-12: Using Virtual Reality for middle school students
Use case 1: Geography - Travel around the globe
This secondary school in French city has been equipped with 6 virtual reality headsets following a call for projects from their county.
Feedback on their use in geography lessons
Through its various themes, the 6th grade geography program invites students to observe how populations inhabit the world.
The virtual reality headsets enable students to take a virtual tour of different parts of the world, giving them a much more practical approach to the case studies in the program, and helping them to work on skills such as “finding their bearings in space” and “analyzing and understanding a document”.
A new way of working the "Living in a highly constrained space" chapter
In the example developed here by their History-Geography teacher using the Uptale platform, the students were working on the theme “Living in a highly constrained space: The Lofoten Islands”. To do this, they had to use the documents in the manual and the interactive resource on the headset.
The aim was to enable students to identify:
- the location of the Lofoten Islands
- the territory’s natural constraints
- people’s main economic activities
- adapting populations to the constraints of this territory
Students achieve these objectives by viewing the 360° video resource and interacting with it to answer questions (integrated quizzes). They can fly over spaces, travel and observe the world while still in the classroom.
Student opinion: Using virtual reality headsets in the classroom
Headsets are used during autonomous learning, lasting around 20 minutes, in which students are grouped into 3 or 4 groups. Within desks arranged in islands, one student wears a virtual reality headset and carries out his or her immersive experience.
” It was extraordinary. It was my first time testing a virtual reality headset. It’s like traveling. “6th grader
Use case 2: Interactive school tour
Explore this French secondary school with Uptale immersive technology.
This virtual tour was carried out independently by a teacher equipped with a 360° camera, and is compatible with virtual reality headsets and smartphones.
Students (and parents) can discover the school and its facilities as if they were there.
