An Analysis in 360°

I think, at its simplest, VR is incredible in that it allows someone to go places or see things that might be otherwise impossible. In playing around with VR for this post, I even tried out a video that essentially shot a camera into the stratosphere. Without VR, that’d be a view to die for. So, it’s hard to talk about VR without talking about how many doors it opens, whether in classroom application or otherwise, for people who are otherwise limited by money or mobility, or for people who happen to be born in a different century from Leonardo Da Vinci.

I played around with a few different VR experiences to get an idea of how VR might function across different kinds of classrooms, because I’m still struggling a bit to imagine it in an English classroom. The silliest one was about dinosaurs. Basically, it just put models of dinosaurs on my kitchen floor and then spouted some facts. It took me a minute to realize that I could resize the dinosaur, so the original stegosaurus was about the size of my cat. Hilarious, but not helpful.

Then, I took a little space jaunt — very cool, and certainly something that could be brought to a science classroom. That being said, my favorite VR experience that I tried out was one that showcased some of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions. On a basic level, it was interesting because I’m not particularly familiar with da Vinci’s inventions, but what I found most compelling about the VR experience in this case was that it took something I really would never have pictured accurately and made it real for a moment! If I read in a book that da Vinci designed an armored tank, I might have a very incorrect image in my head. The VR experience took his drawings and turned them into 3d, moving models! I saw the inside of an ancient robot! It was awesome, and I think it’s worth being a little childishly enthused about!

So I guess that’s what I think VR does best. It takes something, be it da Vinci’s inventions or a stegosaurus or the Silk Road, something that I only sort of understand in theory, and makes it infinitely more real! It’s kind of hard to frame that as a bad thing. The conversation has to become, after that, about how we incorporate that meaningfully into a classroom. In my case, specifically into an English classroom.

My first thought was a sort of walking tour that makes real the kind of world that Bradbury was writing in for The Martian Chronicles, specifically because I feel that his work is so important to consider through a historical literary filter. A VR experience could take students to specific locations of important or recreate landmarks coupled with relevant information that may enhance subsequent readings of a text!

I’ve talked a bit about the pros here, so I’ll talk about some cons next, as well as some of my hesitations as I move towards considering VR in my classroom. So — the technology is pretty easy to come by. VR nowadays doesn’t even absolutely require that you have the Google Cardboard thing (that’s the technical term). While I’m sure there are plenty of students who don’t have access to smartphones, I have yet to meet one. That being said, it took me ages to download any VR experiences, upwards of twenty five minutes in some cases. Moreover, it definitely drained by battery quickly.

But let’s put the technical aspects aside for a moment, so I can pose a question. Do any of you hesitate to integrate smartphone based technology into the classroom because you spend so much time trying to get students to put their phones away? Any time I’ve told my students they could use their phones for research or something similar, it’s always devolved into at least a quarter of the class on Snapchat. So — I guess my question/hesitation is that how do we make VR worth it? How do we make it important/interesting enough that students will play along? How do we make it meaningful enough that it’s worth the risk of students pulling out their phones en masse?

VR and the Google Cardboard are incredible tools, but are high schoolers ready to engage with it maturely? How do we create a situation where they are prepared?