Using VR to Market Your Academic Program!




As we prepared for our first week of recruiting middle school students to our Early College High School, it dawned on me that we could showcase our school even before students had a chance to visit our campus in person!

Although we couldn't bring our workshops to our recruiting events, we could most definitely bring prospective students to our workshops with a virtual tour of our campus.

In my current role as a high school assistant principal, I work closely with a P-TECH school, which is a Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Our unique school model focuses on the trade industries and prepares students for careers right out of high school or college. Our classes teach students trade skills such as welding, HVAC, and construction technologies. Students who join our program not only get an abundance of hands-on learning experiences, but they also graduate with certifications in these trades and college hours to boot!

Our program goes beyond the classroom. We have workshops where students learn by doing and next school year, students will have the opportunity to earn practicum hours working on the job! As you can see we are more than a typical early college and it was very important for us to show this in an exciting, new and immersive way!




So, how could we communicate all this goodness to new recruits?

We decided to harness the power of Virtual Reality to gain their attention. By creating a VR Tour on Tour Creator and then downloading it to Google Expeditions, we were able to capture scenes from our dual credit college courses to show how learning is different. We were able to get scenes of students working in the workshop with a variety of tools. Through the use of VR, not only were we able to show students our construction projects, we were able to immerse them in the projects and have them experience the actual learning environment.


The great part is that students are able to get a feel for our program without having to wait for a class trip to make their visit. They can learn more about what we do at P-TECH in advance which ultimately helps them make the right decisions about their futures.

In order for students to really grasp the idea of what our P-TECH is all about, VR can literally be the window of opportunity for them.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Personalized PD Pilot

Image
Inspiration & An Idea Last summer at ISTE I came across an incredible poster session called " The Amazing Race to Personalized PD " put together by Kimberly Boyd, Kim Wienken, and Rachelle Wooten from Fort Bend ISD. This poster session highlighted a personalized PD model they developed and implemented in their district. As I looked at their format, I knew this was a very feasible concept that would definitely help my teachers earn their technology PD hours- and most importantly, do it in a personalized way! I have often reflected on my professional development methodologies and for the most part have been satisfied with much of my training content and delivery, however there's always been a few things that I knew could be improved. One was offering content that would be engaging enough to intrinsically motivate teachers to apply newly learned tools or resources post-training; another was making content more interesting to them by providing more choice. And t...
Read more

Empower Your Students, and Yourself!

Image
When I noticed this book was blowing up on Twitter, I just had to see for myself what was going on in, "Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning" by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani. I downloaded it to my Kindle, dug in and immediately identified with so many of the ideas I was reading about. In the book we are cautioned that lessons that empower our students won't be easy or perfect on the first try. At first, the process may look a bit messy or a bit noisy but that should not discourage us from empowering our students. It gets better! As I read, I reflected on my teaching and especially on one unforgettable moment. I was taken  back to a time when I was teaching a few years back. I was doing a collaborative social studies project with my 4th graders. I allowed them choose their topic, and gave them a few choices on final products. I was excited about it- the kids were excited about it- and so we started to dig in. Each group was working in differen...
Read more