VIRTUAL REALITY

As any teacher knows, it can be difficult to hold the attention of pupils across the entire curriculum. There are subjects that get unruly classrooms to sit up and pay attention, but sometimes you can see their eyes glazing over as you explain number-bonds, or try to get them to focus on a piece of creative writing! Technology offers new and exciting ways to combat this, without putting undue burden on teachers. Here at Computeam we’re passionate about sharing these techniques, something we’ll be doing at our Spring conference in February 2017.

Manchester-based edtech experts Computeam have been working with archeologist Dr. Diane Davies and the London Grid for Learning to immerse pupils in the Maya civilization. The company’s library of augmented reality learning resources, specifically those looking at the Mesoamerican civilization, won them a prestigious Primary Digital Content BETT Award in London last month.

Over the course of the 2014/15 academic year, various schools across the country have customised their school with immersive environments. These areas allow pupils (and teachers) to be whisked away to limitless places without ever leaving the classroom.

When I began teaching in the early 1990s, schools were approaching the Millennium with great anticipation for a futuristic world of gadgets and technologies. The best we had at that time was a BBC B Computer, hooked up to a dot matrix printer with that awful neverending sheet of paper with the holes in the sides. In some classrooms they were seen as glorified typewriters so that kids could type up a good piece of writing. More adventurous uses included simple programming and filling the screen with scrolling text from a few lines of code.

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