Virtual Reality and Best Buy Education
Virtual reality and Best Buy Education have been a huge part of my instructional technology life this year. My school district began the year working with Best Buy Education to bring Google Expeditions Virtual Field trip kits to every feeder school area. WOW! That means that my instructional technology colleagues and I have worked with every school and hundreds of teachers to deliver standards-based virtual reality lessons to over 7,500 students. How Did This Happen?
My district has 5 feeder areas and a team of instructional technology facilitators who scheduled, trained, carried and carted five Google Expeditions kits from school to school beginning in September to the last week of school. We tried having our internal courier service pick up and deliver the kits from school to school, but the demand was so great that we found that, to be responsive to our teachers, we needed to deliver the kits ourselves. This maximized the number of days that devices were in the hands of students and teachers. Best Buy even wrote about our District in a Case Study for their website.
Find Out More
Best Buy Education has a booth at #ISTE17 (Booth #2818) and will be demonstrating Google Expeditions, Robo, pi-top and much more. I'll Periscoping from the Best Buy booth and I hope you'll tune in. The broadcast will go out to the #ISTE17 and the #PassthescopeEDU hashtags. If I can get my schedule organized I'll try to publish my calendar on line. #fingerscrossed!
We purchased a kit this year and boy has that opened up the possibilities for many of our students! Can't wait to expand our use next year. I am working on developing lessons for staff. Have fun exploring at ISTE!
ReplyDeleteJennifer - We found the same thing! The most rewarding part (or one of them) was working with teachers to create lessons that integrated the VR expeditions into their lessons. Once they created the first one they were hooked!
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