ENHANCING LEARNING AND SOCIABILITY IN PROVINCIAL SCHOOLS USING VIRTUAL REALITY TECHNOLOGIESKostas Anagnostou, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos and Katia L. Kermanidis
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Students in provincial, difficult-to-access schools often face the problems of disinterest in the educational process, limited learning challenges, even social marginalization. The work proposed in this paper focuses on the applicability of a secure virtual world platform to isolated schools on remote Greek villages that allows the students among the schools to communicate and share knowledge. We aim to investigate whether the virtual platform manages to actually expand the schools’ community, and to awaken the participants’ social and learning interests. In this paper we evaluate various virtual worlds and technologies based on cost, security, customization and maintenance requirements. The open source OpenSimulator Virtual World server meets those criteria. We also propose a framework of simple activities, like a virtual photo gallery, that encourages students to capture, exhibit, exchange and discuss content pertaining to their local history and culture and to design the evaluation process to be performed as the next step of our research. |
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