Implementation Through Anne Frank VR
Link to VR Site For Utah Coalition for Educational Technology
Copy Link for Oculus Quest Start Up Guide
Copy Link for Anne Frank VR Start Up Guide
It looks like chaos. Students are in four different groups all working on different, disparate projects. They are talking to each other, some shouting occurs but is rare. Students are asking questions because they are unsure about what is happening and how they are suppose to react to it. This is a Makerspace in full swing with all students in full gear.
About a month ago, after a teacher driven PD, my school’s eighth grade English team approached me. Two of the three are second year teachers and the third, Alex, is a first year teacher. In a few weeks they were going to teach The Diary of Anne Frank and they wanted to do something collaborative and different with the book. They knew about the Anne Frank House VR tour and wanted to incorporate that, but the rest of the project was not fully realized at that point. So over the next few weeks, I would check on them and see how they were coming along on the activity and though it went through several iterations, they landed on the following four activities: a VR tour, a Google Earth tour of the significant sites connected to the Holocaust, an introduction to Jewish culture using 3D printed dreidels, and a BreakoutEDU box on Anne Frank’s story. It is a very ambitious set of activities, and the week before the unit I met with them a few times after school, worked with them on the activities, and gave them ideas for extensions. Then the night before we spent 2-3 hours working as a group to set up the room and make it exciting for the students. We added a graffiti wall as an extension activity for students to share their thoughts about Anne Frank and the Holocaust. Then came the big day.
I would love to say that it went off without a hitch, but, as with all creative endeavors, there were growing pains. It was difficult to get some students motivated, managing twenty Oculus Quests throughout the day was difficult (particularly battery power), and it was difficult to get to every student that needed help. However, when it worked, which was more than naught, the results were incredible. Take one student’s experience in VR. She was in one room of the Frank house and she could not figure out how to get out. As with a lot of people, she started to narrate her thoughts aloud. “This is scary,” “I feel like the room is closing in on me,” and “Can I stop?” were common phrases. However, she stayed in the VR and as soon as she left, I talked to her. “Why did you feel scared?” I asked. To her it was the room: she felt confined and just wanted to get out and see the places beyond the Frank house. I talked to her about Anne’s experience; how she also wanted to leave but could not due to the Nazi party. Furthermore, she could not be loud and that made her feel confined. The student was relieved to be reminded of this idea and she told me thank you for putting it into perspective for her.
Anne Frank Graffiti
However, the vast majority wanted to continue and do the tour all the way through again and explore. They wanted to pick up the artifacts again and explore more of the house. It gave them context for the story that would have been otherwise lost. However, it also helped to heighten the other activities’ goals. The station after the VR experience was the Google Earth tour of significant Holocaust locations. A lot of students dug right into the tour and found some great ideas, but other struggled. I sat down with a few each class and showed them some of the significant locations and what they represented; more than once I went through the Berlin Holocaust Memorial with a student and explained what the memorial was about and what it meant to the Jewish people. Other students needed more context for the beds at Auschwitz, and once they were able to understand what they were seeing the connections to Anne’s story were clearer.
As the two days progressed these three teachers got more and more used to adept at setting students up for the activities and they were able to help students by asking them leading questions and engaging them with the larger Holocaust story than would have been possible with just reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Once the activities were over I sat down with all three of them. First, I applauded them and said how great it went, and then I pleaded with them to keep this activity for next year and to keep developing it. They not only were excited to do it again, but also to come back do more VR with other novels and to add more technologically enabled lesson plans to their units. This brief conversation was a great reminder of one of the great ideas within innovations in education: you can have all the technology, but if you don’t have teacher who feel supported to do something differently then innovations in education cannot happen. It all starts with enabling and supporting teachers to be innovative and helping them if it does not go like they planned.
