The Virtual Classroom: Continued!

Today I took the plunge and had my first group of Year 7's in the virtual classroom for a looksee. 7Y3 are a busy bunch but we had the chance to look through a few of the programs including the Medieval Hall, the Whaling Village and Under The Sea (had to stop them diving through the screen to grab the fish) as inspiration for descriptive writing.

The control is like a handheld mouse. To move directions you move the mouse. Simple. But not as simple as it looks! However, everything went swimmingly (haha) once I handed over the controls to the 11-12 year olds I was attempting to indoctrinate into the joys of writing to describe. "Years of computer games", I told myself. Or maybe they were just better at it than me.

Anyway, the response was pretty good, even from the initially blase ("Can't we walk IN it Miss?". Umm, no, not quite up to Holodeck standards yet, soz honey). Word spread around the school like wildfire and my second Year 7 group wanted to know when they were going by the next period. So we're going again tomorrow! Yay!

Virtual Classrooms

I visited our school's new virtual classroom today - wow! The possibilities are endless and the students will LOVE it.

The classroom uses a 'Portable 3D Steroscopic System' produced by Amazing Interactives. It includes 3D filming so students can create their own Steroscopic films and interactive 3D Mindmapping Systems for books and plays - we looked through the 'Of Mice and Men' map: fantastic.

Although some software is avaliable and is being developed, there appears to be tons of VRML models avaliable online. God bless the internet.

The potential is endless. I plan on dragging my Year 7's into the Elven Forest next week to continue our work on storytelling ..... I can feel a Lord of the Ring moment coming on ....