Using Floreo lessons to determine your students' situational awareness abilities can provide you with a wealth of information to help you start your school year. Virtual reality experiences provide a number of benefits when you are measuring your students' situational awareness. Here are three major benefits of using Floreo as a situational awareness tool, even before clicking the "Start Lesson" button:
Benefit #1: Virtual scenes allow you to place the Learner in a variety of environments in a very short amount of time, making your analysis time very efficient. In Floreo, you can be in the grocery store, then a few minutes later, you can be in a school hallway, and a few minutes after that, you can be in the movie theater, the park, at the pool, or in a quiet snowfall.
Benefit #2: Virtual scenes allow you to stay in a stationary place while your Learner surveys the surrounding area. Some of our Learners are still working on impulse control, making it difficult to be in a single spot in an environment and take the time to observe what is there, let alone differentiate between what are the most important elements of the area. When you open up a Floreo scene and take a moment before clicking the "Start Lesson" button, you have the opportunity to observe what Learners are noticing. You can ask questions to get a sense, not only of their understanding, but also of their ability to describe what they see.
Benefit #3: Floreo's virtual reality scenes are predictable when predictability counts. For most of our lessons, the Learner starts in exactly the same position. There may be a small amount of activity. For example, in Check for Cars, there will be cars driving back and forth. In Choose Your Greeting and Populated Small Talk in Motion: High Traffic, there will be kids and possibly a teacher walking around the school hallway. In Orienting to the Grocery Store, the Learner will always arrive at the entrance to the grocery store.
Situational awareness involves the ability to observe the environment, comprehend the space, and predict what can happen there. Observing the environment is available to Learners when you place them in the Floreo lesson. For our Learners, comprehension is evidenced by the ability to describe the environment. (If you are looking for solid approaches to support your Learner with describing, I would point you toward the strategies outlined by the Visualizing and Verbalizing® program.) Finally, predicting what might happen in that location involves determining what is salient in an environment, what is benign vs. what could cause a problem and, the follow-up from that, is what could be done to resolve a problem that might occur. Situational awareness often points toward the ability to avoid and solve problems, but I would expand the idea to the joyful and pleasant people and events that might occur in a space as well.
Using information from this type of exercise can help you bracket what your student needs to work on this school year. For additional information, including what kinds of questions you might want to ask to get a sense of your Learner's situational awareness abilities, check out this previous blog post.