As the Summer comes to a close, and the School Year quickly approaches, teachers will be looking for the next big thing to add to their curriculum.  They’ll be looking for ways to engage students on a level that brings them closer to the topic, the conversation, and greater understanding.

One tool that was recently released by Google that will surely help teachers accomplish that goal is Google VR Tour Creator.  This amazing tool, allows any user to create a fully immersive 360° tour that can be viewed on any computer or Chromebook, with little to no expense.

To create your own:

1. Go to https://vr.google.com/tourcreator/ and login with your Google Account.
2. Click Get Started
3. Click New Tour or use a Template
4. Add  at Title, Description, and Image to your Tour.
   • NOTE:  Tour Templates are a great place for teachers to start.  You can explore anything from the Human Body to Cityscapes from around the globe.
5. Click Add Scene, and choose a destination from Google Maps Street View, or upload your own.
6. Add a little excitement to your scene by adding Points of Interest.
   • You can include images or narration.
7. When finished, click Publish.  You can share your Tour by URL or by Embedding on a website.

Check out my first VR Tour of Oklahoma

https://poly.google.com/view/0tHiC_yNown/embed?chrome=min

Classroom Use

The uses for a VR Tour are endless:

• Foreign Language & Geography teachers can use a VR Tour to visit far off locations around the globe, related to their lessons
• History Teachers can create tours by uploading photos of past events and locations, and then tie them to locations on Google Maps for a  Street View of the same current location
• Science Teachers can upload photos of the Human Body, for a 360° tour of different systems. (See Tour Templates as mentioned above)
• Literature Teachers can use images related to literary works, and tie them to the locations around the world where they would have taken place
• Agriculture Teachers can take students on a tour of different scenes and practices related to agriculture.

And so much more.  Use the comments section below to tell how you would use, or have used VR Tour Creator in your classroom.

VR Goggles

As stated early in this article, I mentioned that you can create and use these tours for free, with little to no technology other than your computer or laptop.  But if you want to take the tour a little further, with the right mobile device, users can install the Google VR Services App and Cardboard App to view their Tour in a set of VR Goggles (think Google Cardboard).

Want more?

Interested, but don’t know where to start?  Check out these Tours created and uploaded by other users from around the globe.