Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Lifeliqe Creator empowers teachers to create, publish interactive 3D content at ISTE

VR-enabled STEM models immerse students in a trip to space, a walk with a dinosaur, and a voyage through the inside of a shark

Lifeliqe, a learning and productivity platform for interactive 3D, VR, and AR, launched Lifeliqe Creator, a feature giving educators the power to create and publish interactive presentations and ebooks that integrate 3D models instead of 2D images.

Lifeliqe users can explore objects with interactive 3D views, zoom deep into the structure of the objects, experience augmented reality, view supplementary text on a subject, and change the language for a bilingual view in English and Spanish. With the Lifeliqe Creator feature, any of the 1,000 interactive 3D models can be dragged and dropped right into a presentation, ebook or lesson plan, so teachers can provide students with full, interactive 3D experiences.

“Lifeliqe Creator pushes the boundaries of publishing,” said Lifeliqe’s co-founder and CEO Ondrej Homola. “Embedding a real-time, interactive 3D model directly into a text document or a presentation takes it to another level. This enables teachers and students to create resources they have never been able to before, using 3D models instead of images.”…Read More

Research: 3D content can help improve learning

In a survey of high school students involved in the pilot, 76 percent said they preferred learning in 3D over traditional methods.

In one of the first significant studies of the effects of three-dimensional content on K-12 instruction, Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) found that the use of 3D content helped increase student engagement and led to better achievement in some cases—with the lowest-performing students seeing the greatest benefits.

Through a pilot project called “BVS3D,” Boulder Valley teachers used stereoscopic 3D content in eight classrooms within four schools during the 2010-11 school year.

The test sites included fourth-grade science and math classes at Douglass Elementary School, middle school science at Casey Middle School, high school science (including Advanced Placement Biology) at Monarch High School, and middle school social studies, math, and science in a special-needs context at Halcyon Middle-High School, a day treatment and educational facility for students with behavioral problems. Content providers included DesignMate, JTM Concepts, Cyber Anatomy, and Amazing Interactives.…Read More

3D content for education on the rise

Most of the 3D content now available for education targets math and science.
Most of the 3D content now available for education targets math and science.

At last year’s InfoComm, North America’s largest conference dedicated to audio-visual (AV) technologies, the big story was the emergence of 3D projectors for education. But while several companies demonstrated projectors that could display three-dimensional images with the help of special glasses, at the time there was not a lot of educational content available to justify an investment in 3D projectors for the classroom.

Fast forward to this year’s conference, held last month in Las Vegas, and that has changed.

At least a dozen companies now offer three-dimensional learning content, according to industry sources, and some of the major players in the educational video market are rumored to be developing 3D content as well.…Read More