Google Cardboard for Education

This past Christmas I received a Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer as a gift, I had tried out with a friend's phone but wanted a chance to explore it further so I asked for one of my own. It's a $15 virtual reality headset made out of cardboard (hence the name) and lenses and when you insert your phone into the viewer, it becomes a virtual reality device.

Since Christmas I had used my Cardboard to try some fun games, explored different historic landmarks with Google Maps and checked out a couple neat apps, but I still felt that there must be more to it. The apps were amusing and entertaining but the novelty wore off quickly and my Cardboard starting collecting dust. Then, I started exploring Google education tools with another class I was taking and we had to do a presentation on an educational tool for the class. I started to wonder if anyone had tapped into the virtual reality space for education. Once I started doing some research about VR in education,  I felt like I had struck gold. It opened my eyes up to a whole new world of educational tools that I never knew existed, and had the potential to really improve student learning. I found that Best Buy offers entire kits for teachers to start using virtual reality, as well as a webinar I have on my list to check out. Now the kits are expensive, but they include real virtual reality viewers (rather than the cardboard version) and devices to put in them, so I think teachers could assemble their own kits for a lower costs. I won't go into all of potential uses of Google Cardboard for education here, you can see the embedded presentation below for a full summary. Google has their own apps like guided expeditions around the world to all sorts of different landscapes, landmarks, habitats, museums, etc, and a variety of other developers have capitalized on it too. The one use that I found really exciting for literacy was through a program called CoSpaces. This online tool allows students to create all sorts of "spaces" virtually and they suggested using it to create settings from books students are reading and doing virtual storytelling through different scenes. I think this would be an awesome way to help students get fully immersed in the texts that they are reading and really understand what it would be like to be in the characters' shoes. I'm sure there are many other ways Google Cardboard can be used for literacy and I've just scratched the surface with this one app; does anyone know of any other tools to use virtual reality for literacy?




References

CoSpaces: Make your own VR experience. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from https://cospaces.io/

Google Cardboard. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from https://vr.google.com/cardboard/

Google Expeditions I Best Buy for Education. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from http://www.bestbuy.com/site/clp/googleexpeditions/pcmcat748302046351.c?id=pcmcat748302046351

Webinar Series Presents: Google Expeditions. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2017, from https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=reg20.jsp&partnerref=online&eventid=1269084&sessionid=1&key=08BCBA4F6E64B7F07883ECEDD5EBF647®Tag=&sourcepage=register