Virtual reality comes to Sugar Creek Elementary School

Posted on April 30, 2018

By Crystal Donaldson

NORMAL – A Sugar Creek Elementary School teacher received a 10 thousand dollar grant from Beyond the Books Educational Foundation.

Speech and language pathologist, Karen Showalter, was awarded the grant for her ‘Modern Day Magic School Bus’ idea.

The grant will fund Google Expeditions virtual reality technology for students to take virtual field trips to places like to the zoo or inside the human body.

“Many of our students have not been places,” said Showalter. “We have a second grader who didn’t know what a giraffe was. When we’re working on lessons in the class room they don’t have a solid foundation to build upon and that makes it very difficult to put new skills on top of it.”

With the new equipment, teachers at Sugar Creek will be able to take their students on more than 700 virtual reality field trips with out actually leaving the school.

Crystal Donaldson can be reached at [email protected]

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