RALSTON, AB — Technology has slowly taken over the classroom.
Chalk boards and projectors are a thing of the past. Now students have tablets, Chromebooks and are surrounded by computers.
One school division wanted to take that one step further and immerse students in the lesson.
Jocelyn Encinas is teaching her Grade 9 science class about thermodynamics.
Instead of reaching for their textbooks, they’re using virtual reality goggles to see the broken down particles.
“It shows them at the molecular level, what is happening during that reaction so we can put two chemicals together and we can see the evidence of the chemical reaction like a colour change,” she said, describing what her students could see.
It’s part of the Google Expeditions, which is a downloadable app, used with special goggles, to help take learning to another dimension.
“We want to engage them with things that make learning come to life and our textbooks don’t often do that for us,” said learning instructional coach Catchy Hynes.
The Prairie Rose School Division wanted students to be able to explore the world outside their classroom, without having to put their coats on, and made the purchase last year.
“We have a lot of remote locations for our students who have not had the ability to travel outside of southern Alberta, maybe not even out of their area,” Hynes added.
This new technology makes it possible.
The Grade 6 class down the hall explored the entire solar system.
“We learned about the sun, how important it was and how long it took each planet for it to go around the sun and all that,” said Rubie McNeill.
“It was really cool ‘cause you could see it up close and like move around and see different things,” said Jensen Yorke.
“We often get those ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and those exciting moments from the kids,” Hynes said. “We have been able to take them to different places around the world. We’ve taken them to deserts, we’ve taken them into wetlands.”
“We are able to kind of meet the needs of teachers by kind of connecting to the curriculum and looking at areas that would bring that learning to life for them,” she added.
The gadgets can even help ignite the curiosity for those more difficult subjects.
“A lot of the kids were just like amazed, ‘wow!’ It gets that kind of wow factor that gets them engaged in what you’re talking about,” Encinas added.
