Readers, welcome back to the crazy world of education. I hope I don't disappoint by walking you through this wild wild world. As education goes, teaching resources can be scarce. This is what makes it difficult to help our learners when we know different tools are out there but we do not have access to them. Immersive Learning can be extremely beneficial to learners in understanding various concepts by being able to "jump into" the content. Some examples of this is Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Both of these forms of immersive learning helps learner place themselves in places not normally reachable by simply flipping a switch. The video in the link details how some of those immersive learning experiences can be facilitated. While using immersive media one must know the basics of why they are using the media. I detailed this as a five step process to check if they are appropriately using immersive media. The five steps consist of designing a plan, creating a process, selecting the right platform, preparing learners, and evaluate the effectiveness of the media. By following these steps, you are able to plan and evaluate whether the media is actually beneficial for your learners. Using immersive media such as VR headsets can be very beneficial for helping students understand different aspects of content un any given units. One way in which I used VR headsets was having my students take a virtual field trip to the Great Wall of China. This gave students a visual representation of how large and massive the colossal structure was. This helped my students understand the magnitude of the protection it gave China versus the Mongols. Again, I say this because technology is like any tool, it can be very useful, or it can be a waste of time where learners are too busy to look at the Great Wall and instead are looking at the tourists in the images. Buyer beware and plan accordingly when using immersive media, for your sake and most importantly for your learners.
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