VR English Campus Guided Tour

Turning an activity into the curriculum that can benefit more students with a variety of tasks

Virtual Reality is intriguing because it helps provide a more immersive experience as if you were actually being there. By taking panoramic pictures with Google's Street View, complete with writing a script about the campus and recording the English guide in the form of .mp3, we then upload those files to the online platform, 720yun. The website has many powerful features. It can combine a picture with texts, audio, icons, to name just a few.

The whole idea is for the students to practice English writing and speaking skills. First, I divided the class into six groups. Students then decided on which spot they would like to introduce and which task each member would take on. Following that, they discussed how to incorporate the five key elements, including history, location, characteristics, activities, and feelings, into their script. Next, they used their smartphones to take a panoramic picture of the assigned spot with the app. Finally, they recorded the introduction one by one with the laptop.

My students worked in groups of three. Through discussion, each group decided on the following six spots: the main hallway, the library, the principal's office, the lab, the playground, and the toilet. They then picked the assigned tasks for each topic, including paragraph writing, taking panoramic photos, and doing the voice-over. Two of the tech-savvy students helped trim the audio and converted it into mp3. I then uploaded all the materials to the website, assigned each theme with a corresponding oral presentation, and organized the new hot spots accordingly. 

Those 7th graders who took the International Cultural Exchange course definitely have lots of room for improvement in terms of paragraph writing, pronunciation, intonation, and fluency. However, they still got to apply all those skills to this project, which I believe no textbooks or any cram schools would ever try to. When having Skype exchange sessions with Japanese or Korean counterparts next time, my students will be more skilled at introducing the school in English.