In my opinion, it’s sometimes difficult to explain what we do as teachers, and even harder to describe what exactly the role of a teacher is today. Thus, I chose to draw a parallel between the role of a teacher and a tour guide. When we travel, it’s often helpful to have a tour guide to explain the interesting cultural and historical sights and sounds of places we are exploring. Often the information the tour guides possess and the stories they share make places come to life. Making them ever so fascinating and magical. As teachers, we help students to see what is mesmerizing in the world. We expose them to new pleasures and adventures, and then let them decide what they would like to pursue in the future. As a result, one of the many roles we play as a teacher, is the tour guide.
Which leads me to my Rip.Mix.Feed assignment and why I decided to explore the application, Tour Creator. It enables not only teachers, but students and pretty much anyone to make a VR tour using imagery from Google Street View or their own 360 degree photos. Once you’ve created your tour, you can publish it to Poly, Google’s library of 3D content. From Poly it’s easy to view, all you need to do is open the link in your browser, as immersive photos or view them in Google’s VR viewer using Cardboard. On the Tour Creator’s page on Poly, people can also like and share the tour to social media, or use an embed code to put it in a website.
In my tour, I chose to create a Top 5 Attractions in Paris, France tour, as a way for me to tell my story in 360 degrees using images from Google Street View. This allows my students to take an immersive field trip to my favourite city in the world and theoretically anywhere in the world, all while not having ever set foot outside the classroom. Tour Creator also allows students to feature and share their own communities. Amazing to say the least!
By creating this mini virtual field trip, the goal is to have my students virtually travel the world to see and “visit” different francophone cities and counties. Places we may otherwise never have had the chance to visit as a class. The idea is to let students and also the teacher to not only view these amazing places in 360 degrees, but to also build their own VR experiences and stories without needing much technical knowledge. Tour Creator enable students to focus on creating amazing visual stories. Now anyone can build an immersive 360 degree tour from their computer.
This, in my opinion is a whole new world compared to using 2D images and is definitely a game changer. Using images from Google Street View or their own 360-degree photos, students, teachers, and pretty much anyone with a desire to travel can now design and build interactive tours of their favorite locations all through a simplified web based application. This means that virtually anyone, regardless of their experience in VR development has the opportunity to build their own immersive content. How cool is that?
https://poly.google.com/view/2nmPPtYWpNP
I hope you have the opportunity to explore Tour Creator with your students and take on the role of the tour guide in creating your own VR story for your classroom.
