I had watched and explored kindy's, Heathers, and Heidi's virtual tours and posted a comment about it on their walls.
I believe there are many upsides and downsides to implementing this virtual tour into your classroom as a teacher. I think that it is a great way to teach students about different places and learn facts on them by exploring the tour on their own. It is a fun exciting activity they can do, which will be engaging to them because it is totally different from a regular instructional day. It is a change in the media, and it gives variety to your lesson. This virtual tour can be a great way to get kids motivated and tied into the lesson if teachers were to present this at the very beginning of the unit or lesson that they were going to be learning. If i was a student that had to explore and do the application activities on a topic, i would love it because i would find it neat, and exciting that i got to explore this cool world on my own. Also using this at the beginning of a new unit can give ELL learners as well as the regular english speaking students a chance to get a little bit of background knowledge on the topic at hand that will be taught. It will give them a better understanding in the fact that there will be pictures and videos explaining rather than a teacher talking. They may also be able to make conections to their own lives. I believe a downfall to this virtual tour would be that there may not be enough computers to go round, and if you do get into a computer lab, it will take longer than the time given because of all the application assignments throughout the virtual tour. I think this is a major downfall to using this. Lastly, teachers should really get to know their students and how they behave and learn before doing this virtual tour because it may not fit the class they are teaching.