We are excited to welcome Mrs. Dina Voinovich and her fifth graders to Kent State’s AT&T Classroom. Over the next three weeks, the class will be utilizing digital tools to support their exploration of ancient civilizations. As the students are studying ancient civilizations, they will be working with informational text to learn about the topic and will need to utilize specific text features to support their understanding as they are reading. These features include pictures/images, captions, bold print table of contents, a glossary, etc. which all help the reader find information, add context to information presented in the text, call the reader's attention to important words, and help to explain what words mean. 
This week the class is studying the Mayan civilization and students are using several resources and tools to support their exploration. This morning the fifth graders explored the geography, culture and history of the Mayan civilization using Google Expeditions, an immersive education app for exploring the world through virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tours. 
Augmented Reality (AR) refers to tools that extend the physical world to include components of the virtual world. With augmented reality, the user is augmenting their physical world by adding layers of media that pop-up when the user is in a specific location and/or scans objects with a phone or tablet. In contrast, with Virtual Reality (VR), the content is not dependent upon the user’s location in the physical world as all of the content is digital and viewed on a device or in a viewer. The fifth graders used Google Expeditions on iPads to explore the Mayan civilization in virtual reality.
