COVID Positive: Schools embrace immersive tech to connect teachers, students

Children around the world found their daily routines shattered beginning in March 2020 when the coronavirus ran rampant across the world, drastically affecting the way our daily lives function. Remote learning became necessary for the rest of the 2020 school year around the world, and depending on what country you hail from and what your personal choices were concerning COVID-19 and social distancing, in-home vs. virtual learning remained a passionate debate through the last year. Many teachers have had to learn this new style of instruction on the fly, but many of them have adapted nicely thanks to the remarkable pantheon of immersive tools available to them as augmented reality companies reach out to school districts to fast-track their new tech to the market.

Dawn of the Digital Teaching Aid

Teaching Aids have been around since the first one-room schoolhouse opened, but the classroom has not always been the leading environment for giving new technology a whirl. That changed in 2020 when teachers began using video conferencing almost exclusively to keep up with their students while COVID stay-home orders locked most families down for months at a time. Companies like Immersive Learning created a form of augmented reality that let students and teachers hold and study objects in their hands without having to pass the physical models or items from one student to the next. In this way, teachers and students were able to learn more about the origins of COVID-19 by holding a digital model of it in their hands with help from their smartphones, tablets, and web cameras.

Science and Math Brought to Life

Science and mathematics are two of the toughest subjects for children to grasp, especially when they are at younger ages like elementary school. Being shown a video of the solar system is one thing, but being able to interact with it with virtual reality goggles or in a format that is augmented and interactive is an experience that few children are ever likely to forget. The same is just as true, if not more so, with math.Students often struggle to represent numbers on a sheet of paper or in their heads, but in a 3D spatial environment, those numbers can be represented by shapes, items, or any other form of digital representation that makes it much easier to count, identify, group, and manipulate.

Final Thoughts

School districts and educational institutes are some of the hardest organizations to convince on adopting new technology because they are usually spending public money on their expenses, which means they must be transparent and get approval from their boards when it comes to their budgets. But as we all found out in 2020, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and with every school in the modern world shut down for months due to COVID-19, school districts had to think outside the proverbial box in order to keep their teachers and students connected and invested.This has accelerated the rate at which immersive technology is being used in public education for the better.