Watching the virtual tours

I watched the virtual tours of Teressa, Nancy, and Krysta. I really enjoyed all of them. Two of them were about land formations and one was about art history.

There are many advantages and disadvantages for doing a virtual tour in the classroom. The ability to see the distance between locations is one of my favorite features of the tour. It gives the students the feeling of actually traveling to those various locations. I feel that this is a huge advantage to helping students visual various ideas. Another advantage is the ability to link so many different types of representations together to create a learning situation that would reach out to many different types of learners.

Some disadvantages of a virtual tour comes through the actual use of the technology. With some of the tours, it was unclear or difficult to be able to use the features of google earth to do the assignment (for example, using the ruler function to measure the 3D buildings). Also, the links to videos and other materials sometimes don't function properly. Another disadvantage is the amount of computers available. As with all of these technologically based resources, the availability of resources can be either an advantage or a disadvantage. Students may not have access to a computer at home or there may not be enough computers in class for each student to do the tour.