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Let Flexibility Lead To Alignment

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  In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
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Tour Creator Unleashed

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We help out 7th Passion Project Expo this week. We had a lot of interesting projects but there was a first that I thought was pretty cool.

For the past 3 years, I have had a few students build VR spaces to present their projects using CoSpaces. This year though, I had a student decide to use Google’s brand new Tour Creator to create VR experience. Now, Tour Creator may have been created initially with the idea of using landscape images to create a “tour”, but Emily Taylor did something a bit different. She used images and text to create an informative experience exploring theories around interdimensional beings.

Her experience is embedded below, but what’s even cooler is if you go to the link:

https://poly.google.com/view/a3LxyoasCTj

You can export it to the Expeditions App and view it in VR on your own or guide a tour.





In this tour, the hotspots are not specifically tied to their location on the background. But I could image this being done with great effect on something like an anatomy diagram where each hotspot corresponded to a specific part of the body being discussed. Or, an image could be created of some sort of cycle as a background and hotspots could be designed for each stage in the process. Even a student art galley could be used as the background and hotspots could be used to highlight each piece creating a virtual gallery space. I see lots of possibilities for creation of learning experiences by students. I’ll be excited to dig deeper into the possibilities. Just wanted to share out this one because it really pushed my thinking of the possible.

Here is another space that was created by another one of my physics students, Meagan Mullins.

 https://poly.google.com/view/cY8_nTXbU6i

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