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“Guys look, there’s a shark behind us,” one student yelled, causing about 20 small heads to whip around and exclaim in surprise.
The fourth grade class was in a shark-proof cage, surrounded by a school of fish and two sharks. Minutes prior, they had been on Mars, examining the tracks left by the Mars rover Curiousity. Throughout it all, they hadn’t left their classroom.
Students of all ages at the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle in Bellevue were able to take virtual tours around the globe on Feb. 11 through the Google Expeditions pilot program.
The technology, also known as Google Cardboard, is composed of an app and corresponding cardboard or plastic viewing device that allows users to see virtual reality landscapes made up of 360 degree, panoramic and satellite images.
Through the pilot program, schools around the world — including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, Singapore and Denmark — can take their students on virtual tours of 100 different locations.
The Jewish Day School’s eighth graders, who have been studying American history and the American Revolution, were able to take a tour of Philadelphia and see some of the sites they read about in their textbooks. It’s not feasible for the class to travel to Independence Hall in person, but the expedition enables all sorts of schools to access tools to assist classroom learning, said Sarina Ziv, the school’s educational technology specialist.
“Right now, we’re doing a student-driven inquiry into water — what it is, how it works in our ecosystems. We haven’t explored the ocean yet, but it covers most of the earth, so I wanted to show it to them today,” said third grade teacher Linsey Burge on a recent afternoon.
Teachers use a tablet to control the tour. Talking points about the locations are included in the app, and once a teacher selects a fact to highlight, white arrows direct students where to look.
The students were highly entertained, yelling “whoa!” each time they entered a new landscape or found a new detail.
This was the first time that Google Expeditions has come to Washington. The Open Window School also participated in the program, along with other Seattle-area schools.
Ziv filled out a proposal to participate in the pilot program, never thinking they’d make their way to Washington, she said. The program has done most of their work internationally and in the midwestern and eastern U.S. As luck would have it, she quickly heard back from the Google Expeditions team and was able to arrange a visit.
The Jewish Day School uses an array of technology to assist with their inquiry-based curriculum in which instructors aim to build critical thinking skills and allow students to pursue their own interests.
“We want their research to be meaningful, and one way to do that is through technology,” said Suzanne Messinger, assistant head of school.
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