Minnetonka Third Graders Go to Space (Virtually) in a Weather Balloon!

Last week third graders in Bettina Grund’s third grade Spanish immersion class at Clear Springs Elementary visited outer space! Not literally, of course. They used our new ClassVR headsets to leave earth in a weather balloon, rise up into the upper levels of the atmosphere, and eventually end up in outer space. Once they made it to space, they visited the sun and some of the planets in our solar system.

I was with them on this virtual field trip and students were so excited and engaged. They worked with a partner and took turns wearing a headset. I noticed two students girls, Ellie and Evie, who were holding hands as they took turns using headset for a few minutes at a time. I sat down with them and asked them about their trip. I learned that they had been studying the solar system already in class prior to this journey. Evie showed me her science packet about the solar system and explained that they learned about satellites, planets, orbits, seasons, and phases of the moon among other things. Ellie explained that they had made moon viewers using a paper plate with a hole cut in the center and illustrated the various phases of the moon on the plate around the hole. They liked learning about the planets and especially enjoyed this virtual field trip. 

While riding the weather balloon ClassVR uses virtual reality providing a 360 degree environment to look around. When viewing the sun and the planets, the ClassVR experience uses augmented reality. So this means that a mini version of each planet appears to be floating in front of the students while they simultaneously saw their classmates and the rest of the room. For students who were not viewing something while their partner was wearing the headset, they could watch along on the screen up front. On the screen, the teacher was displaying her ClassVR dashboard, in which she can see what everyone is looking at or display one person’s view. She could also guide the tour by having everyone see the same thing.

Bettina explained that using these headsets was an activity that she opted to give a try. She found it fairly easy easy to use and this was the second day the students had spent about a half an hour of class visiting the solar system. This activity was combined out only with science but also language arts after the students learned solar system Spanish vocabulary using iStation. The ClassVR experience fit in nicely as an extension to deepen their learning.

Thanks to the Minnetonka Foundation, 24 Class VR headsets were purchased this year. Eight headsets are stored in one portable case, so the three cases are available for our teachers to check out and use all together or in smaller sets. 

Related posts:

• Class VR Headsets Now in Minnetonka Classrooms
• Fifth Graders Creating AR/VR Experiences to Enhance Learning
• Exploring the Respiratory System with Augmented/Virtual Reality & More in Seventh Grade Science
• Fourth Grade Student-led Virtual Field Trips with Google Tour Creator
• Minnewashta: Learning through a New Lens
• Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools
• Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Class VR Headsets Now in Minnetonka Classrooms

This year in Minnetonka classrooms our students and teachers have the opportunity to use virtual reality headsets for learning. Thanks to the Minnetonka Foundation, 24 Class VR headsets were purchased. Eight headsets are stored in one portable case, so the three cases are available for our teachers to check out and use all together or in smaller sets.

Each of the headsets allows the learner to experience virtual reality in a simulated environment guided by the teacher. Students can explore historical locations such as the pyramids or a castle. They can go into outer space or underwater to explore coral reef. Students can go into the bloodstream to learn about the body or go back in time to see what a site or location looked like in the past.

Class VR provides each teacher with the dashboard to oversee and guide learning. Teachers see a thumbnail in live time of what each student is viewing. They can push out content to all students at once or to specific individuals. Class VR has a library of pre-curated virtual experiences for students as well as a library where educators from around the world can create and curate content. Class VR headsets also work with Google Expeditions.

In the past I have written about a AR/VR experiences that our students have in Minnetonka, such as… We are excited for the increased opportunities to make learning more meaningful through augmented and virtual reality that these sets of ClassVR headsets will provide for our students. They will be a great way to enhance and make learning more memorable for students!

Related Posts:

• Fifth Graders Creating AR/VR Experiences to Enhance Learning
• Exploring the Respiratory System with Augmented/Virtual Reality & More in Seventh Grade Science
• Fourth Grade Student-led Virtual Field Trips with Google Tour Creator
• Minnewashta: Learning through a New Lens
• Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools
• Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Fourth Grade Student-led Virtual Field Trips with Google Tour Creator

A couple months ago I wrote about Fifth Graders Creating AR/VR Experiences to Enhance Learning in an after school club led by Joy Curran, Minnewashta Elementary Advanced Learning Coordinator. Recently these opportunities for students have expanded beyond the club to all grade four Spanish immersion social studies students. Teachers are very excited about further possibilities.

Fourth grade teacher Carolyn Suarez attended a social studies conference a few months ago and was excited to incorporate more virtual field trip experiences for her students. First, teachers started with Google Expeditions, exploring places around the world. If you haven’t seen this master list of over 900 Google VR Expeditions, take a look. There is now a second tab with over 100 AR Experiences, too. Here are some instructions for using Google Expeditions with iPads.

When the fourth grade teachers talked with Joy and heard that they could have students create their own tours they were even more excited. Students used Google Tour Creator as they were researching a Spanish speaking country. The teachers laid out the framework of the project, such as including the country’s flag and a stop at the capital city and include facts about each site shown on the tour. Students were very engaged and created some great tours, learning how to use the program and even add in additional embedded photos such as a dolphin jumping in the water within a beach scene. They even were able to use Merge VR Goggles and refurbished smartphones to view on another’s tours, too.

The teachers explained that this was a good way to get started with VR. Students were very motivated and some even continued to work on their projects at home. The teachers are anxious to try other more extensive projects, such as having the students include audio narration as well as use other VR/AR tools such as CoSpacesEdu with Merge Cubes. They plan to give students more voice and choice in future projects and will be including the option to create a VR/AR project for upcoming assignments. They also received some grant money to purchase more refurbished phones. It will be fun to see what the students create next!

Related posts:

• Fifth Graders Creating AR/VR Experiences to Enhance Learning
• Minnewashta: Learning through a New Lens
• Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools
• Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Fifth Graders Creating AR/VR Experiences to Enhance Learning

Today I stopped by the Minnewashta Elementary after school VR/AR club. About twelve fifth grade students meet weekly for six weeks to learn and experiment with augmented reality and virtual reality tools with the teacher, Joy Curran. When I was there, students were learning to use a program to create augmented reality scenes and stories using an iPad or Chromebook. Some were creating multiple scenes together in order to end up with a choose-your-own-adventure story. They were testing their creations by loading them onto an iPhone to hold up and see their AR character in action. 

Last year, Joy Curran and Heather Baker were awarded a Teacher Grant from the Minnetonka Schools Foundation to purchase virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) equipment for students to use in the classroom. The video above showcases some of these tools in use. 

In previous weeks of the club, Joy had students create their own 360 degree virtual reality tours using Google Tour Creator.  To do this, "students chose a country they wanted to explore and created their own VR tours using imagery from Google’s Street View. They learned how to add sound, embed photos, and add points of interest to their scenes.  Then they went on a virtual field trip and viewed each other’s completed tours in our VR headsets." Finished tours can be viewed with or without headsets.

Merge cubes is another example of an AR tool students have tried out in the club. We continue to encourage all our teachers to try out more AR and VR tools, such as Google Expeditions (see related posts below). It will be exciting to see what students create as they have more time using these tools! 

Related posts:

• Minnewashta: Learning through a New Lens
• Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools
• Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Ray Kurzweil: “The Power of Ideas to Transform the World Is Accelerating”

If you haven't ever heard Ray Kurzweil speak about technology and the future, you should. He is the chief futurist and director of engineering at Google Research. Regardless of whether you agree or not, or perhaps even fear his predictions, he speaks of a radically different future which will quickly be upon us and change our lives, our children and grandchildren, education, and so much more. Years ago at one of the first ed tech conferences I had the opportunity to attend I was able to hear him speak in person. He has a proven track record of making accurate predictions about the future, successfully foretelling many of the technological advances we have experienced over the past few decades. A few weeks ago he spoke at SXSW, and although I was not able to be there in person to hear him, I found the recording of it fascinating and would encourage you to watch it. The video embedded above is actually a pre-interview before his presentation at SXSW. More on both talks with the recordings can be found here. 

Despite statements from people like Elon Musk saying that the "single biggest threat to our future is not nuclear weapons but artificial intelligence," Ray Kurzweil says he is an optimist. He explains that technology is making things better: worldwide, poverty and crime are down. Advances in medicine are greatly improving the health and life expectancy of people. He explains that we tend to focus on the negative because technology and communication allow us to learn of bad news instantaneously--he said a century ago we would have never heard of something, 50 years ago we would have read about it the newspaper days after it happened, and now we can watch things happen worldwide in real time. He also mentioned that as humans, evolutionarily we are in tune to be defensive and on alert for bad things, which is another reason we are so aware of many negative news headlines despite evidence that things aren't as bad as they used to be.

Regarding technology, Ray points out that the cell phones now in the pockets of  teenagers in Africa have the equivalent of what would have been trillions of dollars of communication and computer technology in the 1960s, billions of dollars worth in the 1980s, and millions of dollars worth just a few years ago.  He states that technology is a tool, extending our reach and our intelligence and states that cell phones as "brain extenders." He stated that "years ago we need tools to reach the fruit at the top of the tree, now technology is used to extend our intelligence and our what’s possible." Technology is accelerating ideas that are--and will--transform the world. 

Some of Kurzweil's current predictions mentioned in this interview include: 

• Printing off 3-D clothing is coming in the early 2020s as printers get better and will be able to print out items smaller than threads. 

• Vertical hydroponic farming in urban areas will be widely used. In vitro fertilization for cloning meat tissues for food will transform farming and the food industry. 

• A real wave of transformative AR and VR experiences and use will begin in a few years. Kurzweil explained that with many technologies, the first wave seems promising and generates excitement, but then disappoints, much as AR and VR initially did. Things are getting better behind the scenes and exponentially improving and will really be transformative in a few years.

• Augmented intelligence is coming...if you know about Kurzweil and any of his past work, such as his book The Singularity is Near, you know that he believes in a coming merge between humans and machines. In this interview, he explains that we will have a synthetic neocortex in the cloud connected to our brain, nano technology will enable medical technologies to extend our life span and greatly improve our immune system and replace/print off new body parts. He is predicting this to happen around 2050. For more on this, take a look at Kurzweil's AI Website.

These are just a few of his predictions. It's hard to comprehend exponential change and realize just how soon many of these things are coming and will transform life as we know it! Check out some related posts below:

• Accelerating Changes Needed in Education

• Highlights for Education from CES 2016

• The Golden Rule in Cyberspace

• Back to the Future Part I: 2005 Technology Staff Development Classes- the Beginning of Minnetonka's Digital Curriculum

• Back to the Future Part II: Today's Technology Will Be the Worst Our Kids (and New Teachers) Know

• Back to the Future Part III: SMARTBoards as a Past Catalyst for Future Technology Integration

• Bot Literacy Will Replace Web Literacy as Apps, Search Engines, & Websites Fade Away

• Crystal Knows, Digital Footprints, and Personalized Learning

• Video & Voice Editing About to Make Fake News Even Harder to Decipher (& Change History, too)

• Minnetonka Schools: Innovation is Now Our Strategic Plan 

• Why Does Higher Ed = Lower Tech? Will Colleges & Universities Catch Up to K-12 Tech Integration?

• Beyond Coding and Computer Science in Schools: The Need for Computer Ethics

• The Mindset of Innovation: 5 Behaviors for Accelerating Breakthroughs

• Systematic Innovation: The Top 4 of 40 Inventive Principles to Solve Problems

• This Isn't Your Parents' Education

Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools

Middle School East 7th Graders on a Google Expedition

On Friday, the Google Expeditions Pioneer Program came to Minnetonka Middle School East seventh grade science classrooms. Technology Instructional Coach and seventh grade social studies teacher Carson Hoeft signed up for the program last fall and recently learned that the school was selected to be a site to try out the new technology. If you aren't familiar with Google Cardboard, check out a previous post for an overview: Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom.

The Google Expeditions Program brings a class set of Google Cardboard viewers along with Droid devices preloaded with virtual environments. The teachers can select what they wish for their students to visit. For Friday's virtual field trip, students traveled to Borneo to visit the beaches, jungle, and scuba dive off the coast. 

The content includes information about the locations for the teacher who is a virtual guide for their students as they view things through the Cardboard viewers. The teacher uses a droid tablet to view the same content, and has the ability to pause the images, see a floating icon for each student to determine where everyone is looking, and can tap the tablet to make an arrow appear on the students' screens in order to direct attention to a specific location. 

The students were so excited about the experience. It was great to be present for their initial reactions (oohs and ahs, Wow! Cool!) when they began. In a way I felt like I was glimpsing the future of classrooms to come. I can imagine so many possibilities and so much content becoming available for teachers to engage their students. I can foresee a time when the students don't just have this as a one time event but a daily experience. Eventually students could have their own device to regularly walk across a battlefield with their history class or be virtually present during an important speech. I can also imagine it won't be long before the content is not just static 360 degree images but moving interactive video immersing us in an environment where we can interact with others. Wow!

Here is some additional information from Google about the program:

• The Wildlife Conservation Society, PBS, the American Museum of Natural History, the Planetary Society, and the Palace of Versailles contributed to developing the curriculum for students.
• These trips are collections of virtual reality panoramas — 360° photo spheres, 3D images and video, ambient sounds — annotated with details, points of interest, and questions that make them easy to integrate into curriculum already used in schools.
• While nothing replaces hopping on the bus for a field trip, Expeditions provide an unparalleled opportunity for supplemental learning. Seeing the brilliant ways teachers integrate VR in their classes has taught us so much already.

About Google Cardboard viewer:

• Google Cardboard is a virtual reality viewer made almost entirely of actual cardboard. Cardboard allows anyone with a modern smartphone to experience virtual reality. There have been more than 5 million Cardboard viewers shipped.

Related post: Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Google Cardboard- Virtual Reality in the Classroom

One of my sons trying out Google Cardboard

If you haven't tried Google Cardboard yet, you should. Google's virtual reality glasses are paired with their Cardboard app by the same name. Basically it's like adding a View-Master or old-fashioned stereoscope to your phone. The app takes images, Google Maps Street View photos, 360° panoramic images, and more and splits them into a right and a left image for your eyes, so as you look through the lenses in the cardboard goggles it creates a VR 3D-like environment where you feel much like you are there yourself. 

Source: Gadget Releases

I had my kids try out the Google Cardboard to as well as some other apps. They enjoyed it quite a bit. They walked around the Eiffel Tower, Venice, Jerusalem, London, New York, Rome, Mars, and even through the Great Barrier Reef. A few museums are loaded as well with some dinosaur skeletons, airplanes and the Space Shuttle. In each of these places, you are pretty limited to how far you can move around. In the museums, you basically can stand in the middle and turn 360°. They also tried out some of the free VR apps that have been developed for Cardboard, such as Skydive, Racetracks, Roller Coaster VR, and Crossy Road.

Source: GizMag

This whole technology seems to currently be in its infancy stages. 
There was nothing that kept their attention for too long. Some of the images are kind of grainy and that fuzziness may be hard to overcome. I read that some people experience a little bit of dizziness or nausea, but thankfully we did not. I can definitely see that it will be more engaging and attention grabbing as both the interaction within the images as well as the quality of the images improves. Google has released specs for its Jump 360° camera using 16 separate GoPros, as well as made video on YouTube available for VR, so that should help boost the content available. The goggles themselves are not high tech--the flimsy cardboard button/lever in our $12 Domo glasses didn't work, so we had to stick our finger in to touch the phone every time we wanted to walk forward or click. But this is a great design flaw for students to fix themselves, (see farther below). 

Update November 2015: We tried out six different models/brands of Google Cardboard. D-Scope Goggles with a magnet instead of the lever worked the best for us.

Source: Business Insider

In the classroom, I can see all sorts of opportunities for this tool. First, of course, is virtual field trips. Google currently is working on making Cardboard available in its Google Expeditions Program to a limited number of schools. You are already able to go to any place on earth that is covered in the Google Street View app, just look for the Cardboard icon as pictured. So the opportunity to take your class virtually to any place you were studying seems like a great way to make lessons more real. I suppose soon some morph between virtual reality and a Second Life-type avatar environment where you could see your classmates and your teacher in these locations will be arriving, too. A few years ago at the NSBA Conference, I tried on a pair of YouVist Goggles and toured a college campus which was very intriguing. There are endless possibilities for this type of technology.

Another classroom application I see is the construction of the cardboard goggles themselves. Why buy the pre-made kits when you could have each student design and build their own? Google supplies the specifications. It seems like a great project involving math, science, tech, art, and more. Students could add their own features as well as improve features and flaws like the flimsy lever I mentioned earlier. I'd also love to see a larger cardboard glasses that would allow students to use their iPad instead of their phone, too.

"Either way, we think Google's approach to VR is one of the most fascinating. Cardboard will eventually branch out into the kind of consumer gear that's on the horizon from Oculus and Sony, but there's something to be said for making the most dirt-cheap version possible, and using it in ways that can open future generations' eyes a little wider. Change the world first, make a hit product later." Source: GizMag

In a recent podcast I heard about Facebook's $2 billion investment in Oculus, which explained that there are big plans for VR technology in the video gaming industry. I see a lot of potential for this technology in education, too. It's great that Google has made this expensive technology so affordable and accessible for schools as quoted in the GizMag article above. It will be fun to see what developments take place over the next few years!

Related post: Google Expeditions Pioneer Program Visits Minnetonka Schools