A Virtual Tour of Berlin

Upper School students in Eric O’Connor’s Nazi Germany and the Holocaust class took a live, virtual tour of Berlin in early January. O’Connor hired a guide through Amazon.com to walk the class, live, around Berlin. The guide, who interacted with the class and answered questions, connected with students via a conferencing app as he walked through the streets of Berlin to discuss sights related to the Nazi period. “Hiring the live guide was an experiment that worked out well. Tour guides looking for customers is one of the benefits of COVID-era teaching. I was pleased the technology mostly worked and that the guide, Martin, was tremendous. My students told me that they thought it was fascinating to view in real-time the places we’ve studied, such as the Reichstag and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” said O’Connor. “Witnessing the memorials and historic buildings as they exist right now was a valuable window into how Germany lives every day with the memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust. The whole experience connected the past and the present in ways I’ve never been able to do in class before.”