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Thank You for 20 Years.

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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.
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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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