The objective of this strategic partnership between specialised vocational schools from the Czech Republic and the UK and upper secondary school from Finland is to be able to source the knowledge and good practices from all stakeholders to ensure an exchange of good practices in the digital age. The system in each country holds different predispositions which help to achieve the ultimate goal of the project and can bring added value to individual schools for future teaching activities, especially with novel online approaches. The main target group addressed are teachers who deliver education to pupils mainly in the key group age from 16 to 19 years. The main focus of this project is the implementation of VR classrooms focused on Science, Arts, Maths and English into the schools' curriculum. Maintaining contact between students and teachers across partner schools through mobilities is a key to sustain the covid-19 pandemic without disruption. According to the latest action plan issued by the European Commission which focuses on resetting digital education, the crisis has increased the need to boost the digital skills of educators. In addition, it is necessary to call for practical guidelines at the European level – in particular for education and training institutions – on how to implement effective and inclusive distance, online and blended learning. Improvement of ICT skills of teachers has been identified as one of the key priorities to focus on in the upcoming years. Especially in the current situation, when everything has moved to online and virtual space almost overnight, teachers need development on all levels. Therefore In this partnership, we have decided to help each other to prepare for digitalisation by training our teachers for VR classroom delivery and test the latest technology of NEOS Classroom software at all participating schools and implement it into daily lectures in specific subjects. This might result in better engagement of students, especially those with learning difficulties (LD). There are 12 participating teachers exchanging their best practices from subjects at each school which are Arts, Maths, English and Science. Every subject will be delivered once in the VR classroom physically which will have 15 students and 3 teachers. There will be 9 topics from each subject, where each teacher will cover 3 topics in the final VR classroom. Prior to this, the teachers will start with a VR workshop in Prague learning how to work with the device and NEOS Classroom software. In the next step, teachers will undergo shadowing lectures at partner schools to exchange the best practices from each education system. After physical testing of VR Classrooms, we will be connecting the teachers through VR class remotely. Futurum High School will set up a VR environment so that other partner schools can join virtually online in the class and test the subject delivery remotely with previously developed content by teachers. There will be a tremendous impact on professional development for all teachers while increasing their language and ICT competencies while participating in the VR classroom environment. The participants will create unique materials for use in VR classrooms from each subject which will be uploaded on a newly created project website as an open educational resource. These can be primarily used by organisations in the project, but the results will be available to the public for further use. Each lesson will be recorded and materials used uploaded to be available for students and teachers of secondary schools and any institution active in education. The results of activities throughout the project will lead to the easier application of virtual reality in distance learning at participating schools. Teachers and students with the necessary equipment can be educated from their home without the need to travel to school or another country if they won't be able to. This is prevention to possible long-term social distancing and also higher flexibility of students and teachers. It will help to overcome the inability to meet in person and experience job shadowing or student exchange virtually in the future.
The main objective was the exchange of good practices in the digital age, and this goal was achieved by teachers through cooperation with an international team. This project assisted them in implementing virtual reality into regular classes. Participating teachers discovered ways to use virtual and augmented reality for teaching subjects such as English, Arts, Math, and Biology (Science). We identified which curriculum would be best suited for VR classrooms and teachers demonstrated their VR setups. The results indicated that this tool can be utilized in classes as one of the teaching methods, enabling students to learn the curriculum and achieve learning objectives and aims. Teachers shared their lesson plans with the wider public on the project webpage: https://sites.google.com/gbmc.ac.uk/european-vr-classroom/home.
Digital learning was, and still is, a worldwide learning strategy. Modern teachers should be able to use the newest technologies to fulfill the curriculum and reach learning aims and objectives. Policies were, and still are, focusing on the digital transformation of school education. We saw this project as a possibility to share internationally the best practices of schools with digital education. This cooperation should help teachers improve their ICT skills. As the newest technology, we picked virtual reality. There were not many examples of using VR technology in education. We intended to explore the world of virtual reality and find out how to effectively use it in the educational system. One of the project goals was to find a way to implement VR in regular classes. The COVID-19 situation showed us that we also need to improve digital/online education. We thought that virtual reality could be one of the possible tools for interactive distance learning. In this project, we looked more deeply into this idea.