By Eleanor Hoskins — Posted on: Apr 01, 2015
In light of Austin’s posts on augmented and virtual reality, it seems relevant to showcase an existing educational game that already uses wearable technology.
But I wasn’t peeking on porpoise!
Come to Scarfe Foyer at lunchtime on April 15th to see this month’s Technology in Transit showcase, which features Google’s Cardboard virtual reality technology!
Google Cardboard is an affordable application from Google. Its headset can be assembled at home from an Android phone and ordinary material, but it shows the world in an extraordinary way. Cardboard allows the user to explore pictures and videos in an immersive setup. It offers enormous possibilities to teachers and educators, from visiting faraway locations, to experiencing demonstrations or simulations, to creating their own . It can even be used to view your own photos from Photosphere!
Raising technology awareness is an important part of what we do. On the second Wednesday of every month, Educational Technology Support (ETS) hosts Technology in Transit. Technology in Transit is a space for Teacher Candidates and graduate students to demonstrate different teaching and learning technologies that they have been actively using. The one-hour session offers passers-by the opportunity to engage with educational technology as they walk through Scarfe Foyer during their lunch break.
Our Technology in Transit presenters this month are ETS’s Learning Technology Rovers.
By Austin Lee — Posted on: Mar 30, 2015
In a previous post, I discussed the uses of wearable technology in educational settings. The examples I cited, Fitbit, smartwatches, and Google Glass, are types of wearable technologies that augment reality. They provide additional information about yourself and the world around you, changing how you perceive reality. But what about if you take that to the next step and immerse yourself to an entirely new dimension?
Enter Oculus Rift, a head-mounted virtual reality display that will be commercially available later this year. Lots of people are excited about this new and upcoming technology including developers, video game enthusiasts, technology experts, and educators. But virtual reality is nothing new, it was initially conceptualized as early as the 1960’s and entered public consciousness in the 1990’s with devices like Virtuality’s VR system, Virtual I/O’s iGlasses, and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. However the technology at the time was too expensive, too rudimentary, and too niche to reach mass appeal.
So why virtual Reality is back again now? And why Oculus Rift? Technological advances in the last two decades have made computers faster and cheaper than ever before. The first Oculus Rift prototypes developed in 2012 sold for $300 and completely outstripped similar headsets that went for $10,000 or more in the 1990’s. Perhaps even more importantly, Oculus Rift was recently acquired by Facebook for a staggering US $2 billion. With the financial support from one of the largest technology companies in the world, it seems like virtual reality headsets are going to stick around this time.
But how will all this impact students and educators? Will virtual reality usher in a new paradigm in how we learn and teach? Or will this be yet another piece of overhyped technology that comes and goes? Virtual reality has already found success in training simulations for military and professional purposes. Oculus Rift founder, Palmer Luckey, claims that the technology could revolutionize the experience of hand-on learning and even replace field trips. He claims that while there is educational value in taking children to various sites to gain hands-on experience, field trips as they are now are overly expensive and not very effective because too much time is spent on travelling, lunch breaks, and keeping kids together and safe. He believes virtual reality will solve that problem by allowing students to digitally step into a museum or exhibit without ever leaving the classroom. Virtual reality will also allow students to visit impossible locations in the real world, like a tour through Ancient Egypt or the solar system. Luckey hopes that the technology will make it possible for anyone to travel to the most remote and exotic locations on the planet without having to worry about price or accessibility.
UBC Law has been experimenting with this concept by using Oculus Rift and virtual reality technology to allow students to virtually participate in lectures in real time.
Beyond the more obvious application of simulating interesting landmarks and locations, educators are also experimenting with virtual reality to increase engagement in the classroom using a concept called Transformed Social Interactions (TSI). For example, by altering the user’s virtual experience in subtle ways, like programming the teacher’s avatar to always face the user or changing the teacher’s appearance to more closely resemble the user, researchers and educators hope that students will find the teacher more relatable, pay more attention what’s being said, and ultimately end up with an enhanced understanding of the lesson.
What will the future hold for virtual reality? How will educators be able to take advantage of virtual environments to enhance learning and teaching? That remains to be seen, but as technology advances, prices fall, and new innovations are developed, it looks like virtual reality may finally take a place in the classroom.
By Eleanor Hoskins — Posted on: Mar 26, 2015
(For a refresher on this topic, see our earlier posts on MOOCs and learning through play.)
If you’re interested in learning technology and looking for a MOOC to try, MIT might have just the thing for you!
As part of their edX XSeries on Educational Technology, MITx is releasing Design and Development of Games for Learning on April 1st. In this course, students are scheduled to learn about the history and current theory behind today’s learning games, and practice the many methods discussed to design and develop their own educational games. The class will use its large international community of participants to receive and provide feedback while they learn and collaborate with one another.
Making learning overlap with play is a great way of encouraging students to self-motivate and direct their own learning while also measuring their progress. For just this reason, recent advances in technology have given rise to enormous growth in the design (and redesign) of games for education. While games for learning sometimes tend to re-package content without much enriching it, as discussed in this article from Harvard Magazine, technology undeniably has tremendous potential to challenge students with “hard fun”, and to encourage self-directed observation, exploration and problem-solving.
By participating in a course like 11.127x, educators will have the chance to learn which strategies for creating and implementing games in teaching are actually effective, and apply these strategies to their own practice. The course’s basis in project creation and peer review, combined with its informative videos, should leave participants with a stronger grasp of current conversations, concepts and trends in educational technology.
If you’re interested in learning more about innovative approaches to technology integration, or want to see what participation in a MOOC is like, this course would be a great place to start! Take a look at the edX course homepage to learn more and sign up.
By Eleanor Hoskins — Posted on: Mar 20, 2015
edX and Coursera do a lot for the accessibility of education, but the trend toward free, open online education goes far beyond the phenomenon of the MOOC. Just ask any high school student about Khan Academy: chances are they’ve heard of it, and used its videos to help out their science and math learning.
In fact, pick any high school subject, and there’s likely to be a passionate educator running a YouTube or Vimeo channel working to explain and enrich its core concepts. These video teachers usually welcome suggestions, answer questions, and encourage discussion for viewers all over the world. Their lectures cover an immense variety of topics and issues, and are designed to engage learners at all levels in unusual stories about and new perspectives on a field of study. They also allow educators like Emily Graslie to demonstrate the really hands-on aspects of their unique educational jobs.
Video lecturing requires technical know-how, and the editing process can be time-consuming, but it opens up a far greater amount of flexibility and material than a face-to-face lecture allows. It also presents and illustrates content in a fun, visually engaging format.
Take a look at these two video lectures about educational technology to see what it can look like:
Many of these channels have expanded beyond video lecturing to include audience question periods, interviews with other experts in the field, and even, in the case of Khan Academy, a full-fledged free and open website that blends video lectures on science, math, humanities, economics and more with problem sets and discussion forums. Khan Academy started out with one person recording video lectures, and has grown to unite a huge community of learners with an international community of teachers from museums and schools worldwide.
The movement toward open online education is growing fast, and it’s making students at all grade levels excited about their learning and engaged in finding out more.
Check out some more examples of educational videos below (but beware, they can be pretty addictive!)
And finally, UBC offers several pieces of software, such as Camtasia, Snagit, and Videoscribe, that can help you get started on making your own screen recordings and video lectures. Contact us to learn more!
Click on the slideshow to see more images. (4 total)
instaGrok was March’s technology of the month for Technology in Transit. Presenters Cathy, Charlie, Matt and Justine showed how they used instaGrok to make research fun, organized and visually engaging for students. instaGrok allows students and teachers to explore information in an interactive multimedia mindmap taken from all over the web, and provides a teaching opportunity about finding reliable sources.
The information sheet from this presentation can be foundhere.
Our four featured students this month are B.Ed students from the Faculty of Education’s Personalized Learning and Technology cohort.
Cathy Andre
Teacher Candidate
Cathy is a Teacher Candidate in the UBC Bachelor of Education program 2015. Prior to attending UBC, she completed her undergrad with an Arts major in History at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in May 2013. She has been placed in the Surrey school district for her practicum, and hopes to try and use technology as an addition rather than a substitute in her teaching. She also tries to have fun with all her classroom lessons, as well as to create engaged and curious learners.
Charlie Cronin
Teacher Candidate
Charlie is a UBC BEd student with a background in psychology and French language and literature. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound in Washington with a Bachelor’s degree. Charlie is an elementary specialist in the Personalized Learning and Technology cohort.
Justine Johal
Teacher Candidate
Justine Johal obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and is currently in the Bachelor of Education: Elementary program at UBC. She decided to join the PL-Tech cohort to increase her knowledge on technology and education integration. She hopes to share her knowledge about technology as an educational medium with both students and teachers.
Matt Geisler
Teacher Candidate
By Austin Lee — Posted on: Mar 16, 2015
Imagine a future where anyone with internet access can pick and choose the post-secondary education they want from any university around the world they like, at any time, for free. That future is already here.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are fully online courses that offer course materials such as filmed lectures, and readings. Top-tier universities around the world have created MOOCs on a wide range of topics, from introduction to computer science to a literary analysis to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. MOOCs are free and open to anyone with internet access, so a teenager from Nairobi and a retiree in Helsinki could both find themselves signed up for a MOOC by the University of Calgary.
The simple idea of free, open online college courses has been stirring up a storm in the education world. Why should students pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to take Physics 101 at MIT when they offer the exact same course for free as a MOOC? Many argue that the value of a traditional post-secondary degree happens between and outside lectures, and that experience cannot be substituted by simply watching videos and doing problem sets. On the other hand, MOOCs makes higher education accessible to people who otherwise would not have the means to engage in the traditional university experience. For example, UBC recently concluded a MOOC on Reconciliation through Indigenous Education, a topic of special interest to Indigenous community members in Canada and around the world. The free and open nature of MOOCs allowed these community members to enroll and participate in the course without having to relocate to UBC’s Vancouver campus and paying tuition and housing fees.
Regardless of whether or not MOOCs will ever be able to replace traditional delivery models for higher education, people are recognizing the powerful and disruptive force that MOOCs represent. Large organizations like the US White House and Microsoft are publicly acknowledging and even creating their own MOOCs to rapidly distribute knowledge to the online world. People are excited about the future of MOOCs. If you haven’t already, you should trying taking one too!
For the NMC On the Horizon > Rearranging Learning Spaces event on September 3rd, we’re exploring an long-range Horizon Project trend. There is a focused movement to reinvent traditional learning spaces and rearrange the entire educational experience — a trend that is largely being driven by the influence of innovative learning approaches. Century-old practices in which students learn subject-by-subject, while uniformly facing the front of the classroom, are perceived by many as an antiquated approach to teaching and learning. The multidisciplinary nature of project-based learning, co-creation, and other contemporary approaches has brought attention to innovative designs of learning environments. At this March 13 webinar, we heard perspectives from a panel of thought leaders on how this theme is materializing across different learning sectors and how it can be successfully addressed.
By Eleanor Hoskins — Posted on: Mar 12, 2015
(Earlier this week, we featured creative pedagogical uses of the extremely popular game Minecraft.)
Think back to high school science classes: how did your teachers demonstrate what you were learning? Physics or Chemistry instructors can easily do hands-on experiments to help students learn concepts and use empirical thinking. However, in environmental science, the processes at work involve complicated, long-term interactions between organisms and the environment—not something that fits well in a classroom setting. Yet it’s more important than ever to build students’ interest in the natural world and how it works. How can educators include comprehensive ecological work without consuming all their class time?
Enter the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which designed ecoMUVE, a Multi-User Virtual Environment curriculum. This realistic and open-ended virtual environment has two units that introduce middle school students to the ecosystems of a pond and a forest as they change over time. Students can learn information about plant and animal species, take and record samples and measurements, examine the environment at a microscopic level, look at historical records, and interact with NPCs (Non-Player Characters) to investigate possible causes for events. The game’s interface lets learners observe and explore by playing together.
This inquiry-based platform encourages students to direct their own learning and form their own conclusions. It also develops their teamwork skills—they need to work together to collect and analyze data, like a team of scientists would. ecoMUVE really shows the potential of gaming to transform learning experiences that would be impossible in normal classrooms into something accessible and fun.
By Austin Lee — Posted on: Mar 09, 2015
MinecraftEdu, a custom educational release of the hit video game Minecraft.
Do you know what Minecraft is? If you don’t, chances are you can find out from nearly any elementary school student. With nearly 19 million sales, Minecraft is one of the most popular PC video game titles of all time. It’s not just children who are interested in the game though. Several teachers across the US and Denmark have incorporated Minecraft as a curriculum elective. The company TeacherGaming has even gone so far to create a custom edition of the game called MinecraftEdu that serves as a virtual educational platform where teachers can create or import lesson plans for their students to interact with.
So why has Minecraft suddenly attracted the attention of educators? Although there are other games on the market with a similar level of appeal to school-aged children, Minecraft has open-ended “sandbox” gameplay, where players are free to create and explore whatever they like within the virtual world. In a sense Minecraft is like super-powered virtual Lego, and that feeling of infinite possibility is what attracts children and educators alike. From building challenges to touring through models of historical sites, Minecraft offers a huge range of educational opportunities for educators to engage their students.
This custom map lets players explore 1:1 scale models of famous structures throughout history.
Beyond the screen, parents praise the game for motivating their children to develop their research and English skills in trying to read books, guides, and a myriad of other resources dedicated to the game. Minecraft has also been noted to allow children to develop their virtual social interaction skills in a safe and controlled environment that’s not inundated with the insults, threats, and hate speech that’s evident in many social media platforms.
So what does Minecraft mean for the future of education? Have educators finally found the perfect fusion between education and video games in the form of 16-bit blocks? Only time will tell, but the future looks bright.