Bringing the World to Your Classroom

Technology doesn’t have to shut students down from learning. It can give students access to learning experiences they’d never have otherwise.

Teaching with Technology

Two women looking at a tablet with an overlay of a world map

If you, like me, are a teacher who enjoys traveling, then there is a fair chance that you have been somewhere and thought to yourself, “If only I could bring my students here.” If this has ever occurred to you, then you understand the learning potential from places like museums, cultural sites, and national parks. However, many of our learners don’t have opportunities to travel to places like these.

If you can’t visit a location in person, what is the next best thing? How can teachers build students’ awareness of how to learn from the world, build their knowledge, and set them on the path to connecting with and visiting important sites in the future?

Immersion from a Distance

For teachers who want to bring important cultural sites and experiences to their students, images and websites are not a bad place to start. Video and multimedia, available on sites like these, are better:

Google Arts and Culture offers tours of cultural sites, museums, and works of art captured using Streetview technology.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History offers narrated tours of many of the halls in this world-class museum.
Museum of the American Revolution offers a collection of narrated tours focusing on the American War for Independence.

But in an age where the lives of our learners are fully submerged in unprecedented access to media-rich everything, video isn’t enough. If we really want to capture our students’ attention and engage them like in-person experiences do for us, we need something far more immersive.

To capture students’ interest and ensure that learning sticks, tech-based resources need to be multimodal, collaborative, and inquiry-based. But just as important are the ways that teachers use these resources.

So what does it mean to say that a lesson is immersive? This buzzword often applies to augmented or virtual reality resources, but it’s starting to become more common in conversations regarding inquiry-based and learner-centered design. To capture students’ interest and ensure that learning sticks, tech-based resources need to be multimodal, collaborative, and inquiry-based. But just as important are the ways that teachers use these resources.

Virtual tours come in all shapes and sizes, but most are built around content that can help students build standards-aligned knowledge. What separates the good tours from the great ones is the degree to which they integrate immersive elements such as:

The use of multiple senses such as seeing, hearing, and touch.
The ability for learners to adjust their view or navigate around a location freely.
Opportunities for deeper investigation of elements that pique learners’ curiosity.
Diverse voices and perspectives that reflect the heritage of the cultures being studied as well as those present in your classroom.

Immersive virtual tours with these features provide fertile soil for teachers to design lessons and activities that integrate impactful and joyful learning into the classroom.

Using Virtual Tours Effectively

One resource that I’ve used for years is Cyark, a preservation technology company that creates 360° models of cultural sites to aid in construction and preservation work. However, innovative educators have realized that these tools can also be repurposed to create navigable, narrated, multi-sensory virtual tours of places that not too long ago were only accessible to teachers through textbooks or DVDs. Currently, the site includes tours of more than 74 sites around the world, with interactive videos, interviews with experts and cultural representatives, and images and descriptions of important artifacts.

Teachers can use the Tapestry for Teachers website to explore ways to use these tours in their classrooms or sign up for training to create their own tours.

Teachers who are passionate about using tech need to focus on creating opportunities that make the inaccessible readily available.

There are a multitude of ways that teachers can use virtual tours and trips:

Create opportunities for students to experience the virtual tour together by having them discuss what they notice with a partner or collaborate in small groups to investigate questions or divide up learning targets.
Provide access to places, experiences, and perspectives related to the curriculum that may otherwise be unavailable to students.
Share a compelling image, artifact, or a short segment of the tour, then ask students to make observations and predictions.
Have students make predictions about what they’ll see and then compare what they expected with what they discovered.
Give students meaningful choices regarding how they conduct the tour, including the questions they pursue, the paths they follow, how they demonstrate their learning, or who they work with.

Technology That Opens Doors

At the heart of the recent pushback against classroom technology is the incessant creep of screens into note taking, reading, and other tasks that could be accomplished just as well with pencil and paper. Good technology integration is built upon the precept that you are using it to facilitate learning experiences that are not otherwise accessible.

Teachers who are passionate about using tech need to focus on creating opportunities that make the inaccessible readily available. When a virtual tour can transport students to a place they might otherwise never experience, spark questions they wouldn’t otherwise ask, and give them the agency to explore it for themselves, the screen will be seen as less of a distraction and more of a doorway. The goal isn’t to put students in front of a screen; it’s to put the world in front of students.