Today, technology has achieved great influence in the world, especially computers that have been a great utility for all of us. The U.S. Department of Education in late 2003 reported that 90 percent of people aged five to seventeen use this equipment, mostly in school but also in libraries or at home. For this reason, teachers struggle to find teaching strategies, create instructional materials, and implement a technological infrastructure based on today's schools, and the most innovative has been virtual reality (VR), but What is it? according to Giti Javidi (1999), The term "Virtual Reality" has been applied more widely to include graphics applications that allow users to walk through a simulated environment and, possibly, to interact with objects in it. Also, VR technology is an integrated technology of computer hardware and software that requires the user to be fully immersed into the computer-generated, real-time, and 3D virtual environment as an inside participant to look, listen, manipulate, interact, feel, speak, and even smell if it is possible. It may be a networked or a stand-alone technology. This technological tool is a major support and advance for education that offers different benefits such as: to promote current educational thinking that students are better able to retain and develop new knowledge; enhancing certain skills, for example, effectively coordinating sensorymotor skills; gaining situation awareness through use of simulations; and training in design skills. Also VR permit to visualize abstract concepts, visit different environments and interact with them, that for reasons of distance, time or safety are not available.
An article called "The Virtual Classroom: Virtual Reality in Training and Education" gives one example of a school virtual reality program that is called Touch the Sky—Touch the Universe. It uses an interactive 3-D model of the solar system to help students learn about astronomy. Students fly a virtual spaceship through the model, looking at it from different viewpoints. They watch eclipses and changes of phase as the planets and moons move through their orbits. They can zoom in on individual planets, moons, asteroids, and comets to study them more closely. When they touch a planet or other astronomical object with the mouse pointer, the program shows information about the object, such as its size and the time it takes to complete its orbit. Students can speed up or slow down the movement of the system and find out how these changes affect the movement of particular planets or moons.
In conclusion, VR is an effective tecnology that influences in the educational change and offers a number of benefits to both students and proffesors. This one should be implemented in schools because it makes easier process of learning.
In the following video, you will see an example of virtual reality used to teach a brief overview of science and research education.
Ruth Méndez
References:
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Virtual-Reality/The-Virtual-Classroom-Virtual-Reality-in-Training-and-Education.html
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/7338/virtual%20reality/virtual%20reality%20in%20education.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc&feature=BFa&list=PL3B0A78D77156035B&index=76
Definitively the technology can give many benefits to the assisted education and distantly. Nevertheless, not everything we find in the web can be from reliable sources. It is necessary to to have a lot of care with the content that is read and is in use as reference to the personal assignments, even, in case of being investigating on own initiative, also it is necessary to to be very selective.
ResponderEliminarK, Degano
Virtual reality is an experimental project yet. However, the whole purpose of virtual reality can easily be adapted to education. Education evolves along with technology, even virtual reality can help language teaching by making literally any context or producing any image for students to understand. Even more, the cybernetic approach of VR, that is the one represented by the game Second Life for example, is to my oppinion the very best educational tool a teacher can use. The excessive amenities allowed by the software together with the eager participation of all students make every class unique and comfortable. As the author expressed, virtual reality has pounds of benefits and advantages for education; and as for me, this is the best tool ever used.
ResponderEliminarBy VICTOR YUSTA.