Cathy a.k.a Knives Chau, is educational technology specialist at the Trevor Day School in New York, NY, one of the first schools to participate in Google’s Expeditions Pioneer Program. 

For those unfamiliar, Google Expeditions is a virtual reality program that uses cardboard viewing pieces to take K-12 on virtual field trips; the program is currently being piloted in schools across the country.

Chau described in a post on her blog how the program went in her school. According to her post, a Google Expeditions team began the process by arriving at the school with 3 Expeditions kit- each one containing "a tablet for the teacher dashboard, its own router, 30 Android phones, and 30 Google Cardboards. Three classrooms were dedicated to the Pioneer program for the day.”

Using the cardboard viewfinders, students were able to take virtual field trips to “Athens the Galapagos Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Spain, Brazil, Dubai.. the Moon, Mars" and even six different biomes.

As a technology specialist, Chau had the challenge of guiding teachers on how to plan their Expeditions.

"I tried to frame the experience as an opportunity. What if you could bring your students to this site? What would you want them to see? What would you want them to observe on their own?”

Chau said that though teachers were provided promotional videos detailing how the cardboard kits would work beforehand, she would have preferred to have the kits available while recruiting teachers for the session so that they could at least have some prior familiarity with the device.

As for the students- Chau said every student had a similar reaction of amazement and excitement.

" I am really looking forward for the Expeditions app to be released in a few months. I think it’s going to provide so many opportunities for students and teachers, and will really ignite teachers’ creativity in lesson design!”

Read Chau’s full post here.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

11/03/2015