360 Degree History

Lesson Summary

Using Virtual Reality (VR) technology, students became a historical figure and proceeded to give a tour of a historical site as this figure, without leaving the classroom. These tours were housed on a student built website, Adobe Spark, that incorporates elements from at least Google Expeditions, Google Street View, 360 Cities and/or Britannica.com. Additional sites may also be incorporated and will include, but are not limited to: Tour Builder, Discovery VR, YouTube 360, and YouTube. The culminating activity included the students comparing and contrasting past and present day geography, architecture, politics, etc. based on what the audience is viewing through Google Cardboard (students without cardboard can access the street view on their laptops). They presented their findings and conclusions based on the historical figure they chose. The students narrated what they saw in present day and how it has changed from their time period. Students played the role of tour guides in this process. Finally, they gave their tour and, yes, if they wished, they dressed as their person on the day of the presentation.

TIPC Ratings

Research & Information Fluency

Rating:Ideal

Explanation: World History I students are tasked with assembling and synthesizing information to produce a website where individuals can interact with the past and present. To begin this process, students must develop self generated essential questions to help focus their research. Once the students have completed developing their guiding questions, they research the answers to the questions by finding websites, images and videos that help to answer their questions. Students then need to take this research and synthesize it into a format that will work within all the requirements for their website. Finally, the students must interact with their peer’s websites to learn new information.

Communication & Collaboration

Rating: Approaching

Explanation: Team members work in self selected pairs in which they decide their roles in the research and creation process. Each activity in the lesson allows the teams to work together to complete the task. The last activity for students involves them using their peers’ project to develop a comprehensive knowledge of historical figures and the role they played in history.

Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

Rating: Not observed

Explanation: Not a focus of this lesson.

Creativity & Innovation

Rating: Ideal

Explanation: This lesson provided students with the opportunity to select the most appropriate digital tool and create an online presence that reflects their thoughts and feelings while still providing facts in a historical context . Students were asked to focus on the following:

*Identify a historical figure;
*Identify their role in history; and
*Compare and contrast the difference to current time as your historical figure.

They took these components, researched and then produced a website that connected them personally to the material. By allowing students to choose their partners and to have a voice in the process, they were able to personally connect to the content while being engaged. Students let their creative side shine during the audio tour part of this project. They took different personalities, used different accents and even started voice acting it out in their tours. In the end, the students were able to combine their own ideas and the ideas of historical figures to produce new ideas of how events have changed over time.