TLT Symposium

The TLT Symposium this weekend at Penn State was an awesome opportunity to learn about new technology and exciting ways to use that technology in the classroom. I gained so many cool and fun ideas from this weekend that I am so excited to try in my future classroom. Keynote speaker Dan Heath gave an excellent presentation about his book and the philosophy of making information stick. When students or anyone really, learn something new in the classroom, it is because they have a sense of relatedness to the information. There is a way to receive the information that students can relate to and help to make that information stick in their brains.

Penn State (2019) 

The best put in my of the whole symposium was the different sessions. I love this set up where educators can choose where to go and what presentations to listen to based on their own personal interests. I was able to learn about this super cool idea of how to successfully use virtual reality in the classroom. The example that was given was teaching students different ecosystems using virtual reality. The virtual reality example had a boreal forest ecosystem where you were standing in the forest and there were labels on all the different species you could see. My idea is, what if you can use this for an Ecology class when teaching different ecosystems. Sometimes funds in schools don't allow for trips so you could teach students about an ecosystem and then the student would place the virtual reality headset on to see it for themselves. You could even take it a step forward and help it to introduce different large scale ecosystems such as the tundra, rainforests, temperate forests etc.

One other possible way to use virtual reality in the classroom could be by using it to help teach plant ID or tree ID. I have more experience with tree ID and one of the ways you can go about identifying a species is by the surrounding habitat. So if you could not take your students out to the forest or wetlands for species identification, virtual reality can solve that problem.

In all, I gained a lot from attending this symposium and really appreciated the opportunity to be able to go and learn about new technologies and how to apply it to the classroom.