Future of Virtual Reality (VR) in Education | Best Virtual Reality Apps for Education | Ntirawen

 

Education and technology are interconnected. The contradictory phenomenon is that while being an early adopter of technology, education is also one of the last sectors to be fully transformed by it. Education hasn’t changed for years in terms of teaching approaches and techniques applied.

With the launch of Google Cardboard Headset in 2014 at the Google I/O and the Oculus Rift taking Kickstarter by storm, the world suddenly started paying attention to this technology that had been around for decades yet had failed to be commercially viable.

On a positive aspect, VR can take learning to a whole new level. Students can learn in more details with fun. No more need of big fat textbooks or videos to teach. A student can experience practically anything anywhere virtually.

Here are a number of the key benefits of using AR and VR technology in education and learning.

• Facilitates student learning through gamification and interactivity
• Keeps learners engaged even while learning difficult topics
• Enhances creative thinking
• Fewer distractions
• Fosters increased collaboration
• Can be used for practical training
• Expanded teaching technology with 3D design, modeling, and presentations

We are moving away from simply ‘learning’ a subject or topic to ‘feeling’ the content. This is not simply an engagement tool or a gimmick, it allows a student to explore, to experience or to be involved in something.

Sometimes it is easier to see and hear something than have it explained to you, and occasionally students just need to be taken out of a classroom environment and dropped into an immersive world; where they can watch dinosaurs or walk around them. Virtual reality technology creates the world of imagination, which is capable of breaking the boundaries in traditional education.

Virtual Reality is really poised to change the way that educators teach and students learn both inside and outside of the classroom. While we are just now seeing the beginnings of what will be a full-blown integration of VR into education, it’s clear that VR will deliver the study tools that students need to be successful in fields that have been difficult to teach using conventional methods, as well as, those that haven’t yet been invented.

Best Virtual Reality Apps for Education

Here are some great VR educational experiences:

Unimersiv: General educational content and experiences, such as exploring Rome, the human brain and more. This would be great in the classroom to break up lessons in an interactive way.

ImmersiveVReducation: Another great product for the educational sector, live classrooms with virtual teachers and instructors teaching people around the world.

Google Expeditions: Travel around the world with 360 images - cheapest way for a school/university class to explore the world!

VirtualSpeech: Improving communication and public speaking skills. Deliver a speech and receive feedback on hesitation words, pitch, volume and more.

Titans of Space: The best space exploration VR app out there (are there are loads of them!)

DiscoveryVR: Great collection of 360 video experiences from around our planet, definitely worth checking out.