After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content. The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them. I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
As we are wrapping up our personal learning projects, we were able to include a new option for presentation. That is Thinglink VR. This is the first time I've ever had my students work with Thinklink in the classroom and the VR aspect made it even better.
A handful of students choose this option and a couple completed products are linked below. Note, they are designed to be viewed with VR Googles such as Google Cardboard. So, if you try to view it in non-stereoscopic mode, the hotspots can't be viewed in their entirety.
To view the images in all of their glory, you'll need a smartphone and a set of googles. Even if you don't have the googles you can follow these steps to view in stereoscopic display. You just won't get the desired experience.
It was fairly simple to create. Students used Google Drawings to create the background image for the scene. They then used Google Slides to create each of the individual slides to be each hotspot. As this was our first go around, we didn't worry about adding videos. I'll save that for the next time.
The only tricky part was scaling the Drawing and Slides so they worked in the stereoscopic image. The background was scaled to 5376 x 2688 pixels in Google Drawings to give the maximum panoramic effect. The Hotspot Slides were scaled to 720 x 720 pixels. In stereoscopic mode, they need to be square to show all the info. The only downside is they won't be entirely displayed in non-stereoscopic mode.
Once students had a plan and all the pieces, the assembly is very straightforward. The background image was uploaded. Then, each slide was downloaded as an image and uploaded as a hotspot image.
Thinglink has a vast support center that can be found here.
I look forward to having students use this virtual space to design creative presentation spaces. I think Prezi was a great step towards rethinking presentations as an experiences. I think Thinglink VR will be the next step in this evolution. We just need to let students loose to design in these spaces.
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