Virtual Travel Agency: Promoting Cultural Diversity Through Global Collaboration

Purpose & objective

One of the primary purposes of education is to provide students with the skills and resources to face life challenges, specially taking into consideration that new technologies are changing the world faster than we can imagine. Therefore, the workforce of the future will need global collaboration skills to work with people from around the world to find solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges. Having strong global collaboration skills is one area educators need to start promoting with their students in order to better prepare them for the future.

Bearing this in mind, this project was aimed at training communication and collaboration skills through the use of technology. Therefore, taking advantage of the digital skills sixth graders had developed over the past years on a 1:1 instructional program, they were presented with the challenge to develop a product that would promote cultural diversity among kids. Through a project based learning methodology, and by establishing virtual contacts with international peers, students came up with an authentic artifact. In addition, this collaborative global interactions enabled students to understand different perspectives and to make a responsible use of digital tools for learning and communicating.

Join this session to witness how sixth graders became global collaborators through holding virtual interviews with kids from other countries (Spain, Italy, Philippines, Argentina, USA and Chile) to learn about other cities and cultures from a another kid's perspective. Discover how, after this exchange, students collaboratively designed kid-friendly virtual tours around several cities using Google´s Tour Creator. Learn how through a combination of immersive 360º scenes, text and audio, sixth graders developed attractive virtual tours that help kids discover fantastic places all over the world, strengthen their cultural knowledge and promote cultural diversity. Finally, in order to make these tours easily accessible to other children, students designed a website to display all their virtual tours.

This project addressed multiple subjects transversally. For instance, students deepened their knowledge on Geography, Arts, History, and Spanish and got the chance to practice English as their second language during the interviews they held with children from other countries.

The main purpose and objectives for this presentation are:
- To share with the audience a success story of a project based learning experience, using global collaboration and technology.
- To demonstrate how Google Tour Creator can be an effective tool to design creative and engaging virtual tours for children to discover new places and broaden their cultural knowledge.
- To leverage learning experiences founded in children’s reality developing creativity and communication skills.
- To share with the audience the digital and communications skills developed by our students through global collaboration.
- To give students an international platform to share the process, the challenges they faced along the way and to present their final product (website).

Supporting research

- Randles, J. (2018). 5 ways students benefit from global collaboration.

- Boss, S & Krauss J. (2014). Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age. International Society for Technology in Education

- https://arvr.google.com/tourcreator/