360º Cameras & VR in the Classroom

     I have always been a fan of technology.  I believe that technology can and must be integrated into the classroom for our students.  During my 2014-2015 winter break I was preparing for IMPACT! a project that would look at Mount St. Helens and its impact on people and society in Washington state.  As I was playing around on Google Maps, I saw that it was possible to put 360º images up onto Google.  I was EXCITED!  I had taken one from the summit when I climbed it the previous year and wanted to put that out for the world to see.  I had used the iOS app 360 Panorama, and was not able to load it.  I needed to see how I can load 360º images to Google.

      That is when I came across the Google Photosphere program, which has since been updated to the Street View program.  I saw that you could take a 360º image using the Street View app, for either iOS or Android, and then upload to Google Views and Google Maps.  Then I came across a section that showed a new camera that allowed a user to take a 360º image with the click of a button.  I showed the Ricoh Theta camera to my principal and she was blown away.  I purchased one and began to think about the possibilities of using the camera in my social studies classrooms.  

      As I played with the camera and took pictures and videos on my travels.  I began to load images (Mount St. Helens, Vancouver Art Museum, Evergreen Air and Space Museum, and New Orleans) to Google Maps and was thinking of ways to link them together.  I began to think about how I could have my students take these pictures and create a tour for other students and people to experience.   

      I immediately thought of taking my studnets to the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.  I began scouting the site on my own, and then made contact with the the park historian and museum curator.  We met and began our collaboration.  We tried to make the project fit into the the end of last school year, but that was unreasonable.  We decided to push the project back to this school year (2015-2016).  Pushing back the project allowed for other applications to be developed that will help us create our final product.  During the time, the web application Holobuilder came out and now we have our way to connect the different images and create our tour.  The fantastic thing about Holobuilder is that not only is it easy to use, but the tours can be embedded on a website and be viewed using VR devices like Google Cardboard and the View-Master.  

A sample tour I made using footage from the climb of Mount St. Helens some colleagues and I did over the summer.  

I am getting excited about this upcoming project and the possibilities that these cameras and viewers will allow us to do in our classrooms.  With the Google Expeditions program traveling across the country, and the world, we are starting to see the power that this type of experience can have for our students. No longer to they have to just look at a still image in a book or a print out.  They can see first hand the places that they are investigating.  They can analyze and compare the architecture of Canterbury Cathedral versus the Golden Pavilion-Kinkaku. No longer does the classroom have to be static. This technology allows our classrooms to become engaging, energetic, and dynamic. I encourage everyone to take their students on a virtual field trip, whether it is through a computer, a mobile device, or a Cardboard viewer. I encourage you to visit the Google Street View Gallery, or app, and take your students to places you never thought possible.

IMPACT! 1.0

     Last spring my students and I embarked on a journey to tell the stories of our community and the impact that Mount St. Helens had on them.  To me, having students conduct an oral history project is extremely important.  Not only does it allow for students to build research, reading, and writing skills, but also their communication, teamwork, and technology skills.  This process, although time consuming and messy, is an amazing experience for students to have.

     During the project the students worked in teams to explore how different people from our community experience the mountain in different ways.  The students got to film their interviews with parents, a professional photographer, geologists, ecologists, a glaciologist, volcanologists, and others who work on or around Mount St. Helens.  Then they wrote up the interview and most teams even made a short film/documentary using the interview footage.  Afterwards I have several studnets want to keep working, so they built a website dedicated to hosting their work along with their peers.

     Here is the link to the student created website, www.mtsthelensimpact.org  Please visit the site to see more about the project, aong with the amazing work that the students did.  This project was an important foundation to the work that they then get to do as Freshmen in their biology class.  This past September the same studnets get to go up to the mountain, on an overnight field trip, to conduct research on the plant life and ecosystems in the blast zone.  The interdisciplinary learning that goes on at our school leads to a more developed student and the real world experiences give them skills and memories that will last a lifetime.

Teaching Geography Through Climate Change

        This past summer I found myself exploring many different avenues as to how I would be teaching world geography for my World Studies class. I read a great article from Education Week Teacher titled Six Characteristics of a Great STEM Lesson. As a S.T.E.M. and project-based educator at my school, iTech Prep, I am always looking for ways to bring a new lens onto the topics I teach.  After reading the article and exploring the links I came across another article, Top 10 Places Already Affected by Climate Change and then the PBS video, Paradise Lost.  This fit in perfectly with the first characteristic from the article and with what I learned at my BIE training over the summer, which to focus on a real world issue/problem.  Out of these inspirations came Adaptation.  

         The project gives students a chance to learn how people have migrated and immigrated around the world, the geography of the world, what climate change is, and what places will be affected.  Then they explain how those places will be affected, and come up with a solution that they will promote by creating an advertising campaign for their solution.  It is tied directly to Common Core Standards, and allows the students to be historians, cartographers, scientists, and advertising specialists, while building 21st Century digital skills. 

         With the impact of climate change at the forefront of the news these days, I felt this topic was the perfect way to integrate social studies with S.T.E.M. and a little bit of art.  For an encompassing S.T.E.A.M. project.  Here are the materials for the project, and the requirements.  More info and lesson plans will be posted on my website.

Adaptation Project Green Sheet

Adaptation Resources

Migration History Interview

Family Tree Template

Google Maps Engine Lite

Sample Family Movement Map 

Google Tour Builder

         Being a project-based school like iTech is, it is essential to let go of what may come out of project.  An important thing to remember is that true project-based learning is not product-based learning.  There are times that you need students to practice certain skills and produce certain products, this project allows students do both.  They created some more specific products as we moved through the project and learned some new things, but at the end they were allowed to truly explore their own learning and create something meaningful to them.  Some students made posters, others pamphlets, Google Slides presentations, or even websites.  For those students that wanted to learn new technologies, and experience video making they used iPads, Green Screens, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker and Tellagami.  I have several tutorials on these that I show the students and allow them to explore them in class, but many times the students knew where to find videos that help them learn about how to use these tools.  Even though most students chose pamphlets, there was a tremendous amount to excitement around what the students created.  Here are some of the different products that were made.

Abi's Climate Change Solution 

Save the Sushi! by True

Google Tour Builder

Google Tour Builder is a fantastic new way for students to explore the world. It is a new beta tool that allows users to create a tour just like they would a Slides presentation, except each location appears in a Google Earth window on the screen. This can be used to explore many different topics in the Social Studies. 

Here is the sample tour I made for my class, JZ - San Francisco

In the latest project my class is working on, the students are studying different cities within the United States that have hosted a World's Fair. Over the course of the project students will create a Google Tour that will also host various information that they learned throughout the unit. The students are creating a City Fact Sheet, a World's Fair Fact Sheet, a Trip Itinerary, a Cost Analysis Sheet, and a Digital Tour of the World's Fair. All of the items get to be hosted within the home place mark of their Google Tour. 

Check out the project sheet here: U.S Trip Planning Green Sheet

The project can be adapted to fit what you are studying in your classroom. This started out as a project where students planned a month long trip to a country in the Eastern Hemisphere. The fact sheets can be made to fit the material that you are researching. Feel free to make copies of the materials, and use them how you need. So take a look around at Google Tour Builder, and allow your classroom to expand its' walls to the entire world!

Google Tour Builder Tutorial

*Here are some of the great tours that my students made for our project.

Student 1 - St. Louis

Student 2 - Chicago

Student 3 - New York

Student 4 - New Orleans

Student 5 - New York

Bringing History Class to Life

Augmented reality is a fantastic new technology that can be used in many different types of classrooms. There are a couple different types of AR apps out there, but the one I use the most is the app Aurasma. What Is like about this app is that it is FREE and it is duel-platform so it will work with Apple or Android devices.

You can download it here on iTunes or on the Google Play store.

Augmented reality allows you, and your students to make almost any object into a scannable interactive code. This is fantastic for history, art, english, science, and pretty much any other class out there. My classes and I have used this app to explore different cities, and create interactive museum exhibits that allow the students to analyze, evaluate, and explore different primary sources and their meaning. The app is very easy to use and allows teachers to create separate private channels for the information to be stored so that student privacy remains intact. Here is a tutorial video that I made for one of my classes to help them with the Aurasma creation process.

After the videos have been uploaded, and the auras created, the really fun part begins. Since my classes use private channels with Aurasma the students need to subscribe to the channel in order to see the auras and have the images come to life. I do this by sharing the channel URL with my students via email or our Canvas LMS. Once, the students are subscribed to the channel they are then free to explore and venture around the room to see the different videos linked to the images/objects. This is a different way to showcase and share the students' work and learning. It allows to student choice in exploration and is visual, auditory, and kinesthetic in nature.


The first time that I used this was in a 7th grade World Cultures classroom. We were doing a Trip Planing project where the students had to plan an entire month long trip to a country in the Eastern hemisphere. This included creating a day by day itinerary, cost analysis sheet, Google map and KML file with locations visited, "booking" airfare, and a digital story taking us through their country's capital city in a day. The final product resulted in the students making digital stories using the app Puppet Pals HD, with themselves as the tour guide. The students then linked there videos to a postcard from that country using Aurasma. Finally, the students used iPads to scan the different postcards around the classroom and traveled the world through their classmates' eyes. Here is a short video showing how it looked.

Augmented reality can also be used to create interactive museum exhibits. My U.S. History classes used Aurasma and the app Tellagami to bring our museum exhibits to life. Tellagami is another free and duel-platform app that allows students to dive in deeply to the analysis and evaluation of primary sources.

You can download it here on iTunes or on the Google Play store.

The students were tasked with creating a museum exhibit that revolved around the concept of equality and how it has evolved throughout our country's history. The students were allowed to choose a specific era, or movement, to focus on and then they had to create an exhibit that incorporated analysis and evaluation primary source documents and information about some of the individuals involved during the era or movement. During this project we also took a field trip to the Oregon Historical Society, where the students got to see how exhibits are made, learned about the different elements that make exhibits successful, and got to conduct research in the museum's library. The students then brought this new knowledge back to school and incorporated it into their own exhibits. We then had the students set up their exhibits in and allowed them to explore their classmates' interpretations with their own devices.

Here is the Tellagami tutorial that I made for the students, and an example video that they made and linked to an exhibit.

The Dream of the 1890's is Alive @ iTech... Continued

     During the weeks before and right after winter break, my students were studying the concept of westward expansion in the United States.  One of the parts to the Westward Bound! project was to have the students learn and explore what it was like back in the 1890's.  We did this by using a copy of the Sears Catalog from 1897.  Using this primary source, along with their research, they wrote about traveling back in time and buying gifts for each of their family members.  For more info on this essay assignment, see my earlier post; The Dream of the 1890's is Alive @ iTech.  

     Overall, I was pleased with the results.  I believe that there was some very authentic learning that took place.  I enjoy this style of student inquiry, here are some of the student examples from the project.  Enjoy!

-   Student 1   -   Student 2   -   Student 3   -   Student 4   -

The Dream of the 1890's is Alive @ iTech

     I am not sure who is having more fun during our current class project, my students or me.  Right now my U.S. History students are in a project called Westward Bound!  In this project, the students are studying the era of westward expansion and life on the frontier.  The students are creating fact sheets as they research and become experts in two of the areas of study from our G.R.A.P.E.S. categories (Geography, Religion, Achievements, Politics, Economics, and Social Structure) on either the Oregon, California, or Santa Fe trails.  After they research, and become experts in their areas of study, they will begin working on some others parts to the project.  

     The other pieces to the project include creating a board or video game about life on the trails / frontier, a final large group presentation with visual aids, and writing an essay called The Dream of the 1890's is Alive @ iTech (I'm a Portlandia nut).  I got the idea for the essay from Twitter when a link to Mr. Fladd's blog TeacherToys and his post More Christmas Shopping, Still Without a Flux Capacitor crossed my feed.  As I read through his post, I kept thinking about how cool it would be to do something similar in my own classroom.  

     As I began developing my Westward Bound! unit I thought that an adaptation of this assignment would fit in perfectly.  The students get to analyze primary source documents, create a story about life on the frontier, and justify their analysis.  Here are the requirements of the essay: 

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The Dream of the 1890's is Alive @ iTech

     In this assignment you will be traveling back in time to the year 1897.  Imagine that your entire current family has traveled with you on your trail (Santa Fe, Oregon, or California) and you have established a new life and become rooted in your new home out west.  You are now living in your new frontier city of Santa Fe, Oregon City, or Sacramento.  It is getting close to the holiday season, and you are in charge of buying gifts for your entire family.  You will have $20.00 total to spend, and be buying your gifts from the Sears catalog from 1897.  As you write your essay, you will have to answer the following questions/facts:

•    Describe your family.  

                        How many people are in your family?

                        How old are they?

                        What do they do for a living?

•    What do you buy as gifts for your family?  

                        How much do they cost?  

                        Why are you picking that gift for that person?

•    What would the cost of the items be adjusted to current day prices?

•    If you had the same amount of money from 1897, adjust to today's prices, what could/would you buy your family from the Sears website?

You can use this website to help you do the cost conversions. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

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     I am excited and anxious to see the results of this as we progress though Westward Bound!  It is a great feeling to see the students so engaged and excited everyday.  And, the conversations that are being had between students are informative, educational, and fun!