Augmented & Virtual Reality Experiences for Schools

If you are interested in using AR or VR in your classroom, then you have come to the right place. On this page, we will round up some ideas, resources and links for enhancing teaching and learning with augmented and virtual reality. Contact your Digital Learning Consultant to learn more or to get started using these tools in your classroom!
A man wearing a VIVE VR headset
Image from StockSnap on Pixabay
A person holding an ipad that is using augmented reality to overlay a digital image of Apple Park
Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash
Picture of a woman with a virtual reality headset on her head. There is a computer monitor behind her in the background
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Google Expeditions

Expeditions are group experiences with a teacher acting as a guide to lead the explorers (students) on a journey. A tablet device is used as the guide and smartphones with a virtual reality headset is used with the explorers. The Digital Learning Team at Grant Wood AEA has purchased class sets to use with our local schools. Learn more about how to borrow Expeditions for your class. More resources below:

MERGE Cube

The MERGE Cube is a foam cube with geometric patterns on each of its six sides. When you scan one of those sides with a compatible app, the cube turns into an interactive augmented reality experience! You can move and rotate the cube in your hand to see your AR object from every possible angle. 

It works with iOS and Android devices. The cubes have been available at Walmart at various promotional prices that are as low as $1, but they normally retail for about $10. Just keep an eye open for sales if you feel like adding some to your classroom.
There are a number of apps available for the MERGE Cube in both the iOS and Google App Stores. Many are free, but there are paid apps too. Not all have educational elements, some are just AR games, but MERGE put together a chart of which apps would fit best with which grade levels, along with some suggested curricular areas. You can see those below:
MERGE cubes can also be used with CoSpaces to visualize your virtual world, and the Object Viewer app can be used to get a virtual version of a 3D object that you have designed in apps like Tinkercad or Sketchup. Learn more about MERGE Cubes here.

Google Tour Creator

Tour Creator makes it easy to build immersive 360 degree tours, similar to what you see on Google Expeditions. Viewers can watch your tour on the web, on a mobile device, and even in a VR headset. You can use your own 360 photos, or find one from Google Street View. When you create your tour you can highlight points of interest and even add image overlays. You can also include a voice narration to help the viewers understand more about what they are seeing. Best of all, perhaps, is the ability to use the VR tours you create in Google Expeditions if you lead the tour with an Android device.

Tour Creator is a web based VR tool that you can access at https://vr.google.com/tourcreator. Teachers can log in with their school Google accounts, however, it is not part of the core tools provided by G Suite for Education, so it is best used with students aged 13 or over. Check out the example below to get a taste for the kinds of tours you can create. Learn more here.

Link: The Google Tour Creator Support Page

Looking for more ideas?

The periodic table of ios apps for ar and vr by mark anderson and steve bambury
Click the image to learn more