Why am I writing this personal entry? Well, it is not an attempt to gain any sympathy. It attempts to show what is possible if a clear intention and goal serve the learner's needs. In May of 2022 just near the end of another fantastic school year, I do not remember what happened. But, I was unable to finish the school year and was unable to teach the following year. Why? On May 21st, 2022, I fell down a flight of 16 stairs (luckily carpeted) from the 2nd to 1st story of our home. I was found at the bottom of the stairs. I was found foaming at the mouth. This would lead to a 2-month hospital stay which included an induced coma because my seizures would not stop, several rounds of lumbar punctures, and relearning basic physical movements like something as simple as being able to roll in the hospital bed. Simply put, when I was admitted to the hospital, I was diagnosed as being “critically ill.” Please take a moment and read those words: critically ill. They are not terms...
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 EDU App.
We are having our Fine Arts Extraveganza this week at Brookfield Central High School. So, I decided to create a space featuring BC student work recognized by the Scholastic Art Awards. This gallery space can be navigated with some very basic interactive elements coded in.
Please check out our students' amazing work by following this link and use the arrows to navigate or in VR use the button on the headset to move in the direction you are pointing https://cospac.es/edu/c5n4. But you don't need a headset to experience it if you click on the link. You can also navigate the embedded version below. But, I'd recommend using the link.
If you have the app, you can also scan this QR Code to access the VR art space.
Cospaces have a great interactive tutorial that will automatically be added to your spaces. In addition, they have a YouTube Channel with lots of short but rich tutorial videos to get started. Below is a very minimalistic slide tutorial I will be walking my students through next week.
I have lots of ideas in my mind for how I will use it next year (especially the real physics engine) to let students explore and create. But this year, I’m having some of my students use it to create a space for their passion project presentation. For those students who would traditionally be creating a poster to present their work, I am asking them to create a digital space for their audience to visit. This way it can be shared beyond our presentation night and I won’t have to collect all those pieces of poster board to be recycled in a dumpster. In addition, they'll be able to exercise some skills involving coding and designing in three dimensions with the goal of making an interactive expereince rather than a static representation. I look forward to sharing some of what my learners make.
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