I thought that trying a 360 virtual tour with my students be really cool to try. Being a resource teacher, we don’t focus on much content like science and social studies, so trying to find one that I could use for reading or math was a struggle. With one of my 5th graders, we just finished reading a book about platypuses and their habitat in Australia. I couldn’t find a 360 video for specifically the platypus, but there were a bunch on Australia. So I had her look at one of the Sea Life Aquarium in Sydney, as well as one of the land in Southeast Australia, where platypuses are located. This helped her get a feel of the land in Australia and what the first settlers there were experiencing when they happened upon this new continent and environment.
She had a lot of fun with this looking at the places where a Platypus might live. She also liked the aquarium. Numerous times I heard her say “wow” and “this is cool.” I think that this would be something many students would enjoy when learning about places, animals or history.
We did not have any troubleshooting issues. I showed her on the computer how to do it first and she did not have a problem moving around. She enjoyed it more on my phone, being able to move around the room. Other teachers thought she was taking pictures or a video when they walked in and tried to avoid her. I explained what she was doing and they commented that it would be neat to do as well.
I think that this would be good to do if learning about animal habitats and behaviors as well as history topics.
** I did not include a picture of her because of safety reasons.**