A while back I wrote a post about Google Expeditions. Since then I've come across a couple of colleagues working on a format that has a lot of similar, interesting features. I presented these to Geography school teachers on Wednesday night at a 'TeachMeet' run at the RGS (thanks for hospitality RGS and for Alan Parkinson for standing in to compere). Google were there promoting their expeditions in schools. I couldn't post my slides for copyright reasons so I thought I'd write some notes.
Basic Idea:
Much as in a third person shooter game you enter a fieldtrip 'world' and explore it. You can find markers which can be clicked bringing up web materials (related images, videos, multiple choice questions). The environment can be customized by the teacher allowing them to put in instructions, self assessment questions and links 'in world'. This means you can re-use the environment for different levels of students.
The video above gives you a nice taste, I am not convinced by the 'learning fieldwork skills' functionality but the other features it shows are very interesting.
Daden are a commercial company already working with the Open University on this, Fieldscapes is their project. A colleague of mine at Hertfordshire (Phil Porter) came up with a similar idea.
Google launched expeditions for iOS this week (announcement of release). This is important as previously expeditions was only available for Android devices and, being made available for both of the main platforms, removes a serious hurdle for schools in using it. In the UK, they have also promised to produce lesson plans which goes some way to answering a criticism I raised previously, that they are passive ‘Cook’s tours’ and need to be more active. So while my dearly beloved watched some TV last night I geeked out looking at the expeditions currently available. I concentrated on the biology models, the natural history museums and the geography expeditions. Here are some thoughts on those expeditions:
Wow!
Just like street view before it (my post on educational ideas on how to use streetview in teaching) there is some fantastic content available for teachers to use in teaching Earth sciences. It's totally free. You don't even need the cardboard, you could plug a tablet into a projector to show students the content.
Slick interface and no problems combining platforms:
I experimented using two devices, one following (student), one leading (teacher). No problems mixing iPhone, iPad and Android devices in all sorts of combinations. The ‘show and tell’ interface worked slickly and intuitively, you can direct student's attention to where they should be looking and see where students are looking to check they're keeping up. Nice work.
I'm told that it throws up some errors being used on schools' wifi systems. Having your own WLAN (about £30) gets around this.
Offline:
You can download the data to the teacher's device and then from there, over a WLAN (wireless local area network, think wifi not necessarily connected to internet) it streams to all the student's devices - no need to download the same data to everyone's device. It also means if you have the technical chops you could set up a WLAN in a study centre in the middle of nowhere without access to the internet and run expeditions with students. I'm thinking this will also be very useful in schools with dodgy internet.
Not the right media for the Biology Models
There are a number of human biology expeditions including the heart, the skeleton etc. I'm not convinced they work because they consist of a static, 360 degree view of a the model where you can only see one side. With this type of media you can't see the context e.g, considering the heart:
Where is it in relation to the lungs/ribs/diaphragm?
How does the heart fit in with the circulation system?
IMHO a much better media to use in this context is what I call a 'build animation': video with audio where layers of graphic information are revealed one by one. See Khan Academy's content and compare it with the heart expedition:
One of the photospheres in the ear model expedition is particularly poor: it shows a model of an ear from the outside. Much better to get students to look at the real thing, and, you know what? There are lots of great examples attached to other students' heads all around them.
Museum Expeditions - hmmmm.
I also think the museum expeditions are pushing the format too far. A museum is intrinsically designed around a 'skim view' and 'zoom in' viewing model* - you walk around the hall looking about you generally (skimming), you then see something that interests you so you zoom in: you walk towards it and read the information at the kiosk or exhibit. Presenting materials formatted in this way in an expedition is preventing the zooming in part - you are 'stuck' to one point on the floor without the ability to walk up to an exhibit and access the detail. However, when the museum is impressing us with scale, e.g. discussing the dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History museum (see image), then an expedition becomes more effective because the museum experience is all about staying at the 'zoomed out' view.
Scale in Geography Expeditions:
If there are no familiar items in view (people, houses, etc. etc.) it's impossible to tell the scale of the view:
Any idea how big those icebergs are? A scale comparison needs to be provided, this could be the human drone operator as a Point of Interest (POI) or providing a POI showing a 100m line.
Geography Expeditions need maps:
I also think that the Geography expeditions really need to use maps. Combining what I call the 'avatar view' (human scale view, as in expeditions) with the map view (views from altitude setting the place in context geographically) is a very powerful narrative tool and I haven't seen any examples of this being done in the expeditions. I'll tackle that in a separate blog post.
- Add their own POIs - there are many teaching reasons you may want to show students a jungle in an expedition, e.g. environmental science, biology, geography or tourism. Having only one set of POIs available per expedition is limiting.
- Add traditional PowerPoint slides between the photospheres, e.g. maps putting the location in geographical context (see 'expeditions need maps' above) or showing a zoomed in view of a dinosaur tooth with annotations in the dinosaur example discussed earlier.
Conclusion:
Watch the journey into a glacier expedition, its done by Jamie Buchan-Dunlop (of Digital Explorer fame) and, as usual, he does it really well. My favourite was the Mt Everest expedition, lovely example of taking students to a place that they will never probably go.
*I'm sure there's some literature about this, do comment and let me know if there are some proper terms I should be using.
Expeditions as Purple Cow:Expeditions is Google’s project where you use a viewer (such as cardboard) with your smart phone. The system gives you 360 vision with wrap around visuals so you can turn and look at things above, below, left and right. There was a great sense of excitement around this project at CAGTI16 with teachers interested in how they could use it and I heard very positive reports from teachers who had been involved in the pilot scheme. Google have been very active capturing imagery from polar regions, coral reefs even other planets. I think its certainly something to grab attention, it would be excellent at a Geography University open day or outreach event to pull people in. It reminds me of Seth Godwin’s Purple Cow concept. Well done Google, its worth paying attention to as a project just for this.
Hardware: Currently to use expeditions you need an Android tablet for the teacher and Android smart phones and cardboards for the students. A comment I heard a lot of was 'when will it be available for iOS?' only being on Android is obviously a limiting factor because I doubt many schools are going to shell out on buying multiple Android phones just to use expeditions. I imagine this will come soon.
Cooks Tour: However I think educationally it needs more development. The expeditions I saw at CAGTI expeditions are a ‘Cooks’ tour (see this paper ) - students get a wonderful immersive experience (hear the squeals in this video)
but they are being essentially passive because the lesson is structured around the teacher guiding students' view to interesting points and talking to the students. The students themselves are not doing very much. A Cook's tour approach can be a good introductory exercise at the start of a field trip (again, see the above paper), but to learn properly students need to do more, things like:
Collecting and analyzing data,
Coming up with and testing hypotheses
or even making their own expeditions
Early days: But its early days in the world of Google expeditions. I discussed all of this with Jamie of Digital Explorer at CATGI16 who has been involved in recording expeditions for Google and persuaded me there was more to it than I believed. He pointed out that his recent abseil into a glacier 360 degree video
uses a neat little trick: The film has been annotated with bits of text that students have to hunt for, it becomes a challenge to see if they can ‘collect’ all the text before the video ends. This is getting the student to be more active than the Cook's tour which is good. We both agreed that a lovely educational activity would be to get students to create their own expeditions.
History of VR in virtual field trips: Expeditions are getting attention elsewhere, Audrey Watters has an interesting post about the history of VR relevant to expeditions - she points out that people have been claiming that technology can replace the field trip since the 1920s with technology like the stereoscope. However, Martin Weller's post about Pokamon Go is a good counter point. He makes the argument that just because you've seen an educational technology appear before is not an excuse to refuse to engage when it resurfaces elsewhere and gets a lot of attention.
So I look forward to seeing how expeditions develop and I'm aching to get my hands on an 'ExpeditionsBuilder': GoogleEarthTourBuilder for expeditions that I can get students to use.
"To get the most of an Expedition, it should be preceded and followed with connected learning activities. The Expedition itself is one powerful piece of the instructional puzzle. So as you’re planning for the experience consider the following learning activities for before, during and after the Expedition."
so accusing them of pushing Cook's tours is a bit unfair, they're advising teachers to use expeditions mixed in with activities as but why have they hidden it away off on another 'semi Google' (edutrainingcenter.withgoogle.com) website?
Its a really nice idea, find some streetview (or other geotagged photo or satellite image from Google maps) and ask a geology question related to it. For extra fun, you then have to guess where in the world the photo is from (bottom left map in the image above).
Good use of VR in teaching: The nice teaching point is the geological question, you have to mostly navigate around in streetview to hunt for clues to solve the geological problem. This is a good use of VR, if you accept my argument that this is a simple form of Virtual Reality. The 360 degree vision is actually important to solving the problem whereas in a lot of cases, the VR is only there for show.
Where I'd take it: What would be really nice would be if it developed into a resource where you had a number of streetview points that you navigated to via a Geological map. You'd then have to solve a more complex geological problem. However, I think that would involve taking custom streetview images in order to generate the required material so not a small project.
