How to Find Sharks and More in VR
The closure of Google Expeditions at the end of June was a real disappointment for many teachers. Google has pushed Google Arts & Culture as the alternative to Expeditions, but it’s just not the same. That’s left a lot of people to look for more alternatives. YouTube’s VR imagery is one alternative that I’ve mentioned […]
Google Arts & Culture + Apple Classroom
Google is ending support for Google Expeditions on June 30th. A few weeks ago I shared a short list of alternatives to Google Expeditions. In that blog post I mentioned that one of features of Expeditions that I’ll miss most is the ability to remotely guide or pace students through a virtual reality experience. I […]
Alternatives to Google Expeditions
Last week’s announcement from Google that Google Expeditions will be discontinued in 2021 was disappointing news for many of us. Since then I’ve answered a handful of questions from people who are looking for alternatives to using the Google Expeditions app. Here’s a summary of what I’ve been saying and suggesting to those looking for […]
Four Ways to Create Your Own VR & AR Experiences
Observing and interacting with augmented reality and virtual reality content is nice, but after a while students will get bored with the pre-made commercial content. You can combat some of that boredom by putting students in charge of picking the AR and VR experiences that are of most interest to them while also being relevant […]
5 Tips for New Google Expeditions Users
Image copyright: Richard Byrne Google Expeditions is often the first educational virtual reality tool that I introduce to teachers who come to one of my workshops. Here are five tips that I frequently pass along to teachers who are preparing to use Google Expeditions for the first time. If you have never used Expeditions, you […]
Introduction to AR & VR in Education
Worlds Are Colliding: Introduction to AR & VR in Education was my first presentation of the day today at the 2019 MACUL Conference. This presentation has been updated a bit since I gave it four weeks ago at a conference in Vancouver, B.C. The updates weren’t so much about the slides (although there were a […]
Metaverse Studio – Create Your Own Augmented Reality Learning Experiences
Metaverse Studio is a tool for creating your own augmented reality learning experiences. I have been using Metaverse since its launch almost two years ago. Over those two years it has evolved to make it easy for any teacher or student to create augmented reality learning experiences. With Metaverse you can create interactive, augmented reality […]
What is Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?
Go to any educational technology conference or ed tech blog today and you are bound to encounter augmented reality and virtual reality products. They’re the hot topics of the day in the educational technology industry. Every week I answer questions from readers about AR and VR. One of the patterns I’ve discerned from answering those […]
Immersive Reader in Virtual Reality
Immersive Reader is one of my three favorite Microsoft products (the others others are Hacking STEM and Flipgrid). Today at the BETT Show I got to try a new implementation of Immersive Reader. That implementation is in virtual reality. Immersive Reader in VR is a beta product. In fact, I was told by representatives of […]
Vizor 360 is Now Free for All – Create Interactive 360 Imagery
Vizor offers great tools for creating interactive 360 imagery. I’ve previously covered their Patches program for creating animated VR because that was the free service that they offered. Now their core product Vizor 360 is available for free too. Vizor 360 lets you upload a series of pictures and then stitch them together. After you […]
Introduction to Using Google Expeditions in Your Classroom
Google Expeditions is one of my favorite virtual reality apps for students and teachers. The app provides hundreds of virtual reality experiences for students. There are VR experiences that can be used in social studies, science, and art classes. The guide mode in Expeditions is fantastic for pacing activities inside of the app. Rather than […]
Slides and Notes from LACUE
I’ve just wrapped-up two days of giving presentations at the LACUE conference in New Orleans. A huge thank you to the conference organizers for inviting me and to everyone who came to my presentations. If you’re curious about what I spoke about at the conference, my slides and brief notes are included below. Best of […]
How to Share Your Google VR Tours With Students
Over the last few weeks I have received a lot of emails from readers who had made virtual reality tours in Google’s VR Tour Creator but then ran into difficulty sharing those tours with their students. To answer those questions I made the following video that demonstrates how you can share your VR tours with […]
A Spreadsheet of Phones That Do and Don’t Support Google Expeditions
Yesterday, I answered an email from a participant in my recent Intro to VR & AR webinar. She was having trouble getting Google Expeditions to work on one of her phones. I did a little research and found that the phone she was trying to use Expeditions on didn’t have a gyroscope. The absence of […]
5 Good Resources for Health Teachers
Yesterday afternoon I ran into one of my old colleagues who asked me for some recommendations for tech tools that she could use in her health classes. One of the suggestions that I made was to try the Cardio VR app. I also promised to come up with some other suggestions. In this video I […]
LinguaPracticaVR – Learn English in Virtual Reality
Update August 2019: This app is no longer available. As I walked around the BETT Show last week there seemed to be a vendor selling a virtual reality product at every turn. LinguaPracticaVR is one of those VR products that I tested. LinguaPracticaVR offers free English lessons in a virtual reality context. LinguaPracticaVR builds short […]
Patches – Create Your Own Virtual Reality Environments
In the past I’ve featured Google’s Cardboard Camera and Street View apps as tools for creating simple virtual reality imagery. Those tools are great if you want to capture immersive images of physical environments and share those images with others. But if you want to create completely drawn and animated virtual reality scenes, then you’ll […]
DIY VR Viewer
The post immediately preceding this one featured the new “solo” mode for Google Expeditions. Expeditions is the mobile app that allows users to experience virtual reality tours when they place their phones into virtual reality viewers like the Google Cardboard viewers. If you can’t buy VR viewers for your classroom or you just like DIY […]
Students Can Now Guide Themselves In Google Expeditions
On Wednesday Google released an update to Google Expeditions that allows students and others to guide themselves on Google Expeditions. Expeditions are Google’s Virtual Reality experiences that can be viewed through the Expeditions app on phones placed in Google Cardboard Viewers. The new “solo” mode in Expeditions (currently only for Android) lets students view Google’s […]
Practical Ed Tech Live – Episode #11
This afternoon my daughter and I recorded the eleventh episode of my almost weekly series, Practical Ed Tech Live. In every episode I answer a handful of the questions that I’ve received from readers. The recording of the episode is embedded below. The list of questions and my recommended resources can be found in this […]
4 Virtual Reality Videos About Antarctica
Virtual reality is giving many of us the opportunity to see places that we may never visit in a level of detail that could never be experienced through print or even 2D video. For example, thanks to The New York Times VR app (available for iOS and Android) we can now experience parts of Antarctica […]