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.
In the book and movie Ready Player One, users visit a virtuality space called the Oasis to play, work, create, and learn. Although the world of the Oasis was set in the future, there are virtual spaces where students can learn and create in today. In a recent episode of Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Podcast , I was introduced to a new virtual reality tool for the classroom by his guest Mike Drezek . That tool is CoSpaces EDU . It is a great tool for teachers and learners to build interactive 3D environments on their own our collaboratively. These environments can be viewed on web enabled devices like smartphones, tablets, chromebooks, and desktops. Smartphones can be put into a VR viewer like Google Cardboard to make the environment a fully explorable VR experience. If you head to the Cospace web site and login, you can explore the gallery of user created environments. If you want to get the VR experience in the gallery, you can download the Cospaced ED...