While it might be thrilling to take her eighth-grade English students to tour the Anne Frank house annex in Amsterdam, where young Anne started writing her diary, Mrs. Lindsey King took a more practical approach. She made the location of the book they were about to explore as a class come alive through virtual reality.
Mrs. King first considered the idea when she heard that, through the new VR Alley stations in Holland Library, students could walk any streets found on Google maps. “I figured if they could walk through streets all over the world, maybe they could tour buildings as well,” she says. A quick search for “Anne Frank VR” led her to the Oculus website, a platform currently supported by the GPS VR stations. The Anne Frank House tour was free to use.
Through a virtual reality tour of the Anne Frank annex (which is today a museum), the pages of her diary came to life for the girls. They looked around at the rooms where the family hid, saw the spaces that sheltered them from the Nazis. They clicked on popup graphics to hear a girl explaining what each room meant to the family hiding in it.
The girls then spent time in class reading excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank and talked about her collection of entries she wrote from the confined spaces in the secret annex in Amsterdam, where she and her family hid from the Nazis until they were discovered in August 1944.
“We talked about the external parts of war and how they affect the internal part of a person,” said Mrs. King. The class also discussed three types of conflict represented in her diaries: person vs. society (Jews vs. the world), person vs. person (Anne and her family), and person vs. self (what Anne learns about herself while hiding).
The eighth-grade English classes also read Girl in the Blue Coat as part of their summer reading and will read and discuss Elie Wiesel's speech “The Perils of Indifference.” An author, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor, Mr. Wiesel was a guest at The White House in April 1999 when he gave what is now known as one of the greatest speeches of all times—a charge against one of the most damaging human traits: indifference.
GPS students will write their own essays about how war affects a person and explore how journaling develops self-reflection. “The hope is they learn to take action and not be indifferent about the plight of others,” Mrs. King said.
Lindsey King explains to her students what they will see