Apps for Education
A positive side effect of the emergence of mobile phones is their ability to be used as educational tools. There even exists a category on the Google Play Store just for educational apps; most of which target young children. Some can be used to complement secondary education though; standard apps include Wolfram Alpha, Photomath, and Google Earth.
These apps can be used to introduce new concepts, provide exercises to reinforce concepts learned in class, and even take students through lab exercises. In fact, I just reviewed an app that does all three of these things: MEL Chemistry. The full review, completed by Josephine Collins and myself, can be found below (pdf).
As an educator, it could be useful to search for your teaching area in the Google Play Store (or the App Store) before fleshing out lesson plans. It might be that there is an app that can act as part of your lesson, saving you some time and effort. This also helps introduce some new modes to your instruction (visual, tactile, audio) to lend more multiliteracy focus to your class.
Virtual Reality
For our review of MEL Chemistry, we did not explore the VR extension due to the ever-growing length of our review. Basically, this extension allows students to become analysts in a virtual laboratory. This is extremely helpful for students who have yet to work in a lab setting since it helps reinforce safety procedures without the risk of a potentially harmful accident.
With the growing accessibility of virtual reality (not to mention lower and lower prices), it may be feasible in the future to replace some lab experiments with virtual reality activities. It may also help students learn in environments or do things that they couldn’t do in real life, either due to cost or safety. Think about exploring different extreme environments, like the arctic or the surface of the moon, or shrinking yourself down small enough to observe the atomic structure.
Below are a few videos related to virtual and augmented reality in education:
Featured Image:
“Exploring the Universe in Virtual Reality” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0
