Friday, February 22, 2013

Google Glass in the classroom...some ideas


I thought it's really cool that Google is working on an experimental project with lots of potential like the  Google Glass, and I am sure it would just be a matter of time, perhaps really soon, before its initial potential could be seen in the classrooms. And perhaps to get the ball rolling, here are my 5 initial thoughts on how it can be used in the classrooms.
  1. Have the Glass networked with one another and the teacher's, and students would then be able to  see a virtual board on their screens, or see the Google Docs that the teacher has opened from his/her shared Google Drive. Very useful when used out of the classrooms, say during field-trips or school outings to locations out of the school premises
  2. Conference calls, hangouts, Skyping using the Glass would be an even better experience with the Glass. Students and teachers could work from different locations, even different countries, and lessons could be done via the video tool. In fact, recording the lessons would be a natural thing to do, followed up by perhaps a review of the lesson/s.
  3. Alternatively, the concept of a Flipped Classroom could be greatly enhanced here. Students would be able to learn content before their lessons, from other sources, and then present them to their classmates during lessons. In fact, why not enable multiple screens to appear on the Glass, so that there could be one-to-many interactions.
  4. Allow the teacher to form groups within the class through linking the Glasses together, and get students to then collaborate on working on a project whilst leveraging on it. It could be a small group of students working on a media coverage of a school event, but being in different locations and reporting in ala a news network, at different times of the event.
  5. Link up the Glass with sketching elements like a stylus, or why not enable the finger/s of the Glass wearer to be the stylus. Students would then work on sketching their ideas, on say, a subject area on coming out with designs to solve a physical problem. If networked, small groups of students would be able to work on these set of sketches concurrently! In fact, if computing power permits, why just work on 2D....let's have 3-dimensionality in these Glasses as well. SketchUp on Glass anyone?
These are just my initial thoughts of the potentials of Glass in classrooms, that I can think of at the moment. There's definitely more ideas out there, on top and above what I've read about in some of the comments and articles. Perhaps the above might work in the first versions...or not. But whatever it is, the Glass would definitely open up newer unimaginable possibilities to the teachers in the classrooms.


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