Oldham School Gets First Class Travel - Virtually
An Oldham school has been selected to take students on expeditions to the Antarctic and the Amazon Rainforest without moving from their classroom!
Oldham Academy North is one of the first in the world to trial virtual field trips using state-of-the-art technology provided by Google.
The tech giant announced its so-called Expeditions Pioneer Programme earlier this year to bring its new virtual reality kit into classrooms.
Using the kits, students can explore more than 120 locations including the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef and Antarctica.
The Expedition kit includes ASUS smartphones and a tablet for the teacher, VR (virtual reality) viewers as well as a router to connect all of the devices to an app that can operate offline when there’s no connectivity.
Oldham Academy North Computer Science teacher Stephen Smith said; "It's a really exciting time for a tech giant such as Google to be coming into the Oldham Academy North to share their latest technology.
"It's something they are trialing all over the world and we've been so fortunate to be able to use the kit to help us to teach difficult topics using virtual reality."