#i have to do virtual simulated classrooms and the students all have avatars
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sniffanimal · 23 days ago
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I think any situation where you're web conferencing, for any reason, should be done in VRchat with custom avatars. every shareholder meeting, training simulation, or disciplinary HR meeting should be held in a space where there's a vocaloid using tts, an intricate fursona model, a mii, and rouge the bat as wide as she is tall
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tombeane-blog · 3 years ago
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The Metaverse - Part Two
“Virtual Reality is an option.”
A teeny tiny little brain chip has long since been inserted into my Prefrontal Cortex.  I no longer need to wear that uncomfortable VR headset or any tactile gloves or any other physical devices.  I can sync to the Metaverse any time any where.  And because it is linked to my motor coordination 'directives' as well as my sensory receptors, I can feel and use all five senses.  I can 'smell' rain, 'squeeze an orange, 'feel' myself walking.
"Hey Alexa, over here! - Wow! Still looking mucho pulcritud!  Take me to the town square prontisimo."
"No problemo Tomas'.  Is that a full head of hair since I saw you last?  You are more handsome than ever!  Zip....Pop...Hereyago - VR Town Square."....
...."Hey, Vern you made it......Que Pasa Pendajo?"
"Not much.  What brings us here today?"
"I've always wanted to learn to ski.  How about that?"
"Sounds great!"
"Alexa - Jackson Hole Ski Resort please.....Zip....Pop.......Thanks gorgeous."
We spend the next couple of hours learning to ski.  We experience the cold, the wind, the falling down.  We quickly become OK at it and decide to hit the slopes.  Better and better - we finally tackle a ski jump.  I'm 'Eddie, The Flying Eagle'.  Later, virtual Hot Buttered Rums by the fire in the lounge.  I get virtually tipsy and tell an off color joke to Alexa - who doesn't appreciate it and slaps me - and it 'hurts'.
Back in the real world, I try skiing for real and I'm not as good as I thought.  Broken leg and brain hemorrhaging.  VR algorithms decide I need surgery.  At the hospital they place me in a surgery pod.  A massive machine with dozens of arms surround the operating table.  Each arm capable of holding many different types of surgical instruments.
"Alexa, since I'm already in surgery, can you have a plastic surgeon make me a teeny better looking?"
"Not sure that can be done Tom but I'll find someone willing to touch up your already gorgeous face."
A surgeon somewhere far away enters the Metaverse and mentally takes control of the surgery pod.  My pain receptors are blocked.  They ask me if I want to go into the Metaverse and watch a movie, or, watch the surgery.  I pick an old John Wayne movie.  The surgeon mentally controlling the surgery pod pokes, prods, slices, splices and stitches.
The Plastic Surgeon using other tools in the surgery pod, simultaneously makes some extremely minor mods to my face. The movie ends. I'm in a recovery room.
The next day, staying in VR, I'm back on the job because my pain receptors are still blocked and I have jobs I can do quite well virtually.
Three days a week I'm a hedge fund manager in the Stock Market specializing in LittleBittyBitCoin investments and the other two days I teach "Great Hindu Athletes of the 6th Century" in a virtual, meticulously simulated Harvard University classroom.  My students adore me.  Some are real.  It's harder and harder to tell which are real people and which are avatars.  I think, "does it matter?".
Life is good.  I can be in the Real World or the Metaverse and I can instantaneously slide back and forth between them any time no matter where I am.
Even in the Real World I constantly have information available from the Metaverse in sort of a 'heads up display'.
Sometimes I'm not completely sure which 'world' I'm in because they overlap so much.  I find myself more and more comfortable when I'm virtual.  The real world seems so limiting.
In the virtual world I can hear the color red...taste numbers...see music...be William Shakespeare...live in any culture from any time in history.  I can fly in space.  I can chase dinosaurs, be chased by a dinosaur, have a dinosaur pet, be a dinosaur, eat dinosaur steaks.  I can be a demigod.
In the real world, I seem so weak and powerless and everything around me seems colorless and boring.
Decades of decades slide by.
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cslowell · 6 years ago
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Class 8: Overview of Immersive Education and Immersive Learning
Midterm for Caroline Lowell
Class 8: Overview of Immersive Education and Immersive Learning
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Before beginning this course, I had never heard of Immersive Education. I was been aware of the new kinds of technology that children were learning through, I had played Minecraft while babysitting numerous times, but what I did not know was quite how all of these different facets of virtual reality and technology could come together in an educational environment.  Throughout this course, I have learned the importance of immersive learning.
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I would define immersive learning as the exploration of education through simulation and virtual reality. One aspect of this course has been using second life to connect with, and collaborate with our classmates. In second life you become an avatar that you are able to customize and travel around as. The game comes equipped with different worlds you can meet up with friends in and explore. Many of these worlds are based on real places, such as London, Korea, and so on. I think this kind of simulation could be extremely interesting in a classroom setting. Instead of hearing what another place is like, students would be able to experience it as if they were there. Making their world view a little bit bigger.
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ImmersiveEd holds multiple Immersive Education Summits every year all over the world. The summits give teachers and students alike the opportunity to attend workshops and learn more about Virtual Reality and immersive learning. By participating in these summits, students have the ability to receive what are called knowledge tokens, otherwise known as “knownans”.  These are a form of digital currency that can be used for conferences, training programs, Minecraft, and more. By participating in these summits and earning knowledge tokens, students are able to dive deeper into the world of ImmersiveEd.
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ImmersiveEd uses many interesting techniques to teach students in new and creative ways. I think it’s important that this technology is made available for as many students as possible. One of the ways children are learning through ImmersiveEd was through attending field trip scenarios through the use of a simulator.  One of the examples we’ve seen of this was of a simulator of an ecosystem that lets you get a close up look at all the different parts, as well as giving you information and simulations of how it all works together. This is important because it is the kind of experience students could have in a classroom setting all of the time, as long as the school could provide the technology to do so.
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Throughout this course, we have explored the basics of Virtual Reality, Cryptocurrency, and much more. As technology enhances, it is so crucial that everyone, but especially children receive the proper education regarding this technology. ImmersiveEd has many creative and interesting programs that are making sure children will grow up knowing how to use their technology to the fullest. I think one of the greatest issues regarding technology today is that we have so much of it and only use it for trivial reasons, such as editing teeth to appear more white in our Instagram photos or keeping up with social media influencers. This is some of what I have learned in my Immersive education course at Boston College thus far, and I look forward to learning more throughout the semester. If you would like to learn more, check out ImmersiveEd.
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bcpateretdiscipulus-blog · 6 years ago
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Class 8: Overview of Immersive Education and Immersive Learning
Daniel Manning Class 8: Overview of Immersive Education and Immersive Learning
Immersive education has been a key component of the Collaborative Computing class at Boston College.  Immersive learning allows students to experience learning in new and exciting ways like experiencing hard to reach environments ranging from the tops of mountains to the sea floor without ever leaving the classroom. Another major advantage of immersive learning is the ability to collaborate with other students no matter where they are located.  Through Immersive education students are able to work in the same virtual space connecting more intimately from afar than ever before.  Thanks to improvements in connectivity, these experiences can happen seamlessly.
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Virtual environments identical to actual places have made it possible to travel just about anywhere in the world without leaving the classroom.  These new spaces are lifelike and are capable of being fully interactive.  Immersive environments have the ability to put students face to face with all aspects of the surroundings.  One such program allows students to explore a variety of ecosystems and explore everything about it from the largest mammals roaming the area to the smallest single cell organisms floating in a swamp.  This technology allows students to get out of the text and into a close to real life field experience.  
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Virtual reality and hologram technology have also made it possible for students to not only immerse into an environment but also allows students to do things like work on a piece of machinery together from afar.  Using VR and Immersive learning students from around the globe can, for example, work on the same car together at the same time.  VR makes it possible for a student in Los Angeles to move parts around for a student in Boston. These different experiences help teach students to work collaboratively with people they have never met.  They can also help connect students whose work complement each others’ skills or share similar interests. 
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 Immersive Education environments also allow students to connect in virtual environments which can be navigated by avatars.  All of these environments and more like learning games, 3D Printing, simulations, and artificial intelligence are featured and discussed at annual Immersive Education Summits.  These global summits, hosted by the Immersive Education Initiative, bring like minded people together to work to create better immersive learning experiences.  The summits also give tech companies an opportunity to demo their new technologies.  The summits are supported by major companies which have already begun to implement immersive education for their own work spaces.
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     These are just some of the new and exciting things I have learned while taking the Boston College Immersive Education Collaborative Computing class.  Other exciting immersive learning topics include knowledge tokens and blockchains.  
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marco42james · 7 years ago
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Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Mary Howard on episode 293 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
Mary Howard’s students build and learn in Open Sim, a virtual world like Second Life. From building architectural constructs to understanding the Diary of Anne Frank, literature comes alive in this virtual world.
On April 26, celebrate PowerofEcon on Twitter with Discovery Education, CME Group, and their Econ Essentials Program. We’ll have free resources available for downloading. To join the celebration, tune into the Twitter chat with me, fellow teachers, and the CME Group’s chief economist on April 26th at noon Eastern Time, using #PowerofEcon.
Visit www.coolcatteacher.com/econ for more information and remember to tweet out your pics about how you teach your students using #PowerofEcon.
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Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher
Stream by clicking here.
***
Enhanced Transcript
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Link to show: http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e293 Date: April 18, 2018
Vicki: Today we’re talking with Mary Howard sixth grade teacher in New York State. She was a finalist for New York State Teacher of the Year for this year, 2018.
Mary, you are bringing literature to life in Open Sim.
Other resources:
Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education
Web 3D: Students Using OpenSim Reflect on the Pressing Issues that We All Ask About Using Virtual Worlds
Simple Virtual Reality in the Classroom with Google Streetview and Google Cardboard
You and I were actually talking before the show. I used to do some work at Open SIm, and people really pushed me toward Unity. I found it to be really hard.
What is Open Sim? It sounds like there are still people using it, huh?
What is Open Sim, and is anyone still using it?
Mary: Yeah, there’s still quite a few educators, especially out in the trenches, using Open Sim.
Sometimes it’s a hard concept to describe. It’s a virtual environment.
We hear a lot of talk now in Ed Tech circles about how we can get these students engaged and speak a language that they’re speaking. Really an Open Sim (simulator) is a great way to do that.
We bring these students into a virtual world. They have an avatar, and the avatar walks around this virtual world. Then I incorporate my curriculum through the virtual environment. It’s really exciting stuff!
Vicki: So educators, think about (how) some people host their own Minecraft servers. This is in some ways like Second Life. It looks a little bit more realistic than the pixelated Minecraft types. A lot of really cool things you can do in Open Sim, even though some people have pushed toward Unity.
So what are you doing with Anne Frank and teaching literature in you Open Sim world, Mary?
Mary: Yes! Well, the students have this world that they go into. The platform is held at a server with our local district.
Like you described, just to give people a little more of a background, it’s really great for middle schoolers, because by the time they’ve hit sixth and seventh grade, a lot of them have moved on beyond Minecraft, or they really can’t get their heads around the fact that a teacher is using Minecraft.
I always say to the students, “It’s like Minecraft on steroids. We’ve gone away from the pixelation, yet we still have the power of the building and construction,” which really speaks to students’ creativity.
Open Sim is like Minecraft on steroids
So in the program that I use, the Anne Frank house was actually re-designed in the virtual environment for the students to visit. So they go into a reconstructed Anne Frank house.
They read, of course, the companion novel that goes along with it, and they’re able to sort of “see” and visualize what’s going on in the novel.
Yet they’re also able to build and construct their own reflective pieces within the virtual environment. In one case, a student actually built a World War II bomber and placed that in the Anne Frank Museum that’s in the virtual world.
So, there are just so many ways to be more hhands-onwith the novel when you’re using a virtual environment.
Vicki: What are some of the things that students are really taking away, that you couldn’t get from just a class discussion about Anne Frank?
Mary: Well, it’s really an engagement practice.
The virtual environment group that I work with — this Open Sim group — I actually don’t do the Anne Frank house.
I do an extension off of that, which came from the initial project. It was a three-year project. Several teachers began the Anne Frank that’s actually in our seventh and eighth grade curriculum in our building.
But then I began the project in this Open Sim environment with “An Era of the King.”
So you sort of have to imagine the Middle Ages and Medieval Times, which is the curriculum that I teach.
Teaching the Middle Ages in a virtual environment
It’s great to teach the Middle Ages to begin with — you have your knights and kings and queens and castles — but it’s even better when you can bring them there!
So I had thirty kids in the computer lab. They’re all in there as an avatar, wearing Middle Ages clothing, walking around a Middle Ages village.
Then of course, the curriculum is gamified, so they have different levels of challenges that they have to engage in — which are knowledge based — in order to learn the curriculum, but also succeed in the virtual world.
So when you asks questions about what do the students get out of it? It’s just this whole package of things. It’s taking curriculum, making it engaging and exciting. and putting it at a level where the students are genuinely coming from nowadays
Vicki: So you’ve been using this for a while. Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past?
Are there any mistakes we can avoid?
Mary: Oh goodness, yes! (laughs)
That conversation could even be longer than the successes. (laughs)
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: I think that just comes with technology. People ask me, “How do you do all this tech stuff?”
And the first words I say are, “Be fearless.” You have to just be willing to let it go and be willing to understand that mistakes and accidents will happen.
Our first experience, the very first time… I was so excited to get these students in the Open SImulator. We sat there on laptops in a classroom, and I tried to get all 25 students online at the exact same time.
We overloaded our system. No one could get on. Everybody was raising their hands and kind of whining, “It’s not working. It won’t let me in.”
It was just one of those high stress moments like, “Oh no. This is an absolute disaster.”
And those are going to happen.
As you know as a tech person, you really have to be fearless and just understand, it’s going to happen. But you can’t break the children.
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: (laughs) They’re going to be fine.
Vicki: And, it’s a learning process. I remember one thing I had learned is to try to get the kids in ahead of time to create their avatars, just because that tends to put some strain on things, and you know, it just takes time to learn this stuff.
So what have you done right, Mary? What’s one of the big things that you’re like, “Yes, this has made a huge difference.
What is your favorite project, where you knew you totally got this right?
Mary: Oh, I love that question!
Well, I think my favorite project was that we did in the virtual environments is a project combined with our local community. We have a Darwin Martin house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright build here in Buffalo. There’s a huge Frank Lloyd Wright connection in Buffalo
I worked with a local BOCES person to set up an opportunity for the students to actually build in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We gave (the students) (virtual) land, and we gave them an opportunity to learn about the architectural principles behind Frank Lloyd Wright.
Then we took them on a field trip to the Darwin Martin house.
As we were walking around the Darwin Martin house after spending a couple of weeks discussing the architectural principles and researching Frank Lloyd Wright and what he does, seeing and hearing ten year olds say things like, “Look at that abstract design,” or “See how he incorporated this central hearth in this home.”
Hearing that language manifest itself right on site, but then going back to the virtual environment when we got back to school, and seeing the excitement that the students had, designing and creating homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright form…
It was just the most magnificent and rewarding project that I think I’ve ever done with students. It’s just a really exciting thing to see what the students could build and design when you let them go, and let their creativity blossom.
Vicki: OK, Mary, to all the teachers listening to you… Give them some encouragement to try something virtual.
I mean, there are so many ways you can do this. There’s Open Sim, of course there’s Minecraft.
Some people are doing the Google Expeditions, and that’s great. But we need to understand here the differences. They can actually build. They can sandbox. They can create.
Mary: Yeah…
Vicki: There is a difference between experiencing something and creating something.
So, what’s your pep talk to teachers for utilizing this type of immersive technology?
Why should teachers try something like Open Sim?
Mary: I think we spend a lot of time saying that our equipment can’t handle it, or our tech department can’t handle it, or our filters won’t allow that to happen.
And I also say, “Be that rogue teacher.”
You know, be the lady in the corner of the building that has all the cats, because if you are that person, you take the lead.
Your tech department will find a way to make these things happen. And once it happens, the explosion in creativity is so worth it.
We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over using technology as, “Oh, I have to INSERT that into my curriculum. Or I have to add that onto my curriculum.”
And it’s really a paradigm shift.
You have to realize that it IS the curriculum.
It is going to generate all of that critical thinking, and all of that inferring, and all of those (things like) “tolerating ambiguity” and all of those buzzwords that we have that we want our students to do.
This one element happens.
If you get out there and explore and make it happen, all of that other stuff that you’ve been worried about with your students?
It falls into place.
Vicki: That is great advice for us, remarkable teachers!
Now get out there it make it happen!
Mary: Yeah! (laughs)
  Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford: [email protected]
Bio as submitted
Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Western New York State and was a finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year for 2018. She considers herself a FEARLESS educator and an early adopter of many EdTech initiatives. Mary attempts to create a culture of inquiry in her classroom and hopes to build future innovators Her blog, http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com features many of her EdTech pursuits including an Augmented Reality Sandbox that she uses in her classroom, makerspaces, coding as well as the use of Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments in her classroom. Mary is also a specialist in engagement, and uses digital tools to engage students and ignite their learning. She has presented throughout New York State and numerous other conferences including MACUL (Michigan) and at ISTE Philadelphia, Denver and San Antonio.
Blog: http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mrshoward118
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.
The post Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e293/
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newidaho · 6 years ago
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3.  FuTech Virtual Home School
Don’t have the time/patience/desire to read with your eyes? Don’t have eyes? Well, have your friend read you this:  You can check out the audiobook for free on Apple, Google, Stitcher, or Spotify.  Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday!
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12 December 2054
This was one of the most beautiful classrooms Charlie had been in all year.  The beach scene was especially nice considering it was winter in New Idaho.  Of course, it never got too cold by the Jungle, but if he ever happened to visit the mountains on the edge of town, Charlie had to wear at least a couple layers.  It was nice to be on a balmy beach in the middle of December.
Of course, most of the heat was in his head.  Though his visual environment showed him sitting on a beach in a group of about 50 other kids, looking out at the sun reflecting off the crashing ocean waves, the actual temperature he felt was no hotter than the room he sat in.  After four hours of class, however, it was easy to forget that this was a simulation—even though the sand underneath him obviously felt like carpet.
‘So, to recap.  If you see a number next to a letter, what does that mean?’  Mr. Carlson stood at the front of the classroom, the dark-skinned math teacher Charlie had met earlier that fall.  He had never met Mr. Carlson in person, of course, so it’s hard to gauge whether this was what he actually looked like.  It was always easier, however, to just believe that nobody doctored their looks in the Virtual Environment.  Charlie himself certainly hadn’t changed his avatar.  Even if he had the money to spend on a decent app for that, none of the students at FuTech were allowed to alter their appearance.  Technically, the same rule went for teachers.  There were rumors, however, that some of the richer students were able to get around this rule.  And it wasn’t hard to believe that the more popular teachers could get around it too.
‘Multiplication!’  The response was voiced with varied excitement by about 20 students.  At FuTech VR HomeSchool, it was drilled into the students to be grateful for their opportunity to have an education, and especially to have an education at FuTech.  After all, it was God’s Will that His children be educated, and the FuTech community was put here to train children and adults alike to carry out this Will in this next generation of Virtual Reality.  What some might call “Displaced Humanity,” FuTech called “Empowered Humanity”.  These new worlds, went the idea, were put here by the Lord Himself.  The Devil was in these worlds too, of course, but FuTech vehemently denied that Satan had any but the smallest influence in any of their students or simulations (for they oughtn’t deny original sin).  They prided themselves on their acknowledgement of God’s gifts.  That’s why all the freshmen were trained to respond with vitality to all their lessons, even though many were quite tired after four hours of classes.
‘Great.  That will do for today.’  Mr. Carlson started to put his belongings in order.  Charlie always thought it was funny when Mr. Carlson cleaned up—he could easily
program his papers to organize themselves.  Of course, part of the responsibility of Empowered Humanity was that they mustn’t forget the history of humans on Earth—Jesus had left them to act without such technological shortcuts for at least 2025 years, after all.  Mr. Carlson put his papers into his briefcase and continued, ‘Why don’t we stand for prayer.’
With a smile, Mr. Carlson motioned for everyone to stand up.  A breeze blew the palm trees around them, lending ambiance to the situation even if Charlie couldn’t feel it.  He noticed, however, that a couple of the students around him shivered.  This implied a couple possibilities.  First, they were likely in a sensory chamber, whether rented or owned.  Second, they had the money to rent or own a sensory chamber.  Charlie knew jealousy was a sin, but he couldn’t help but wish he could have felt even more present on this beach.
‘In the name of the Father and the Son we join hands in the Other World.’  The students moved into a circle and joined hands.  It wasn’t quite like holding hands in real life, but Charlie at least felt a pressure somewhat resembling a human hand due to his Lucid Gauntlets.  His were a couple generations behind, but at least it didn’t feel like he was holding onto nothing.
‘Heavenly father,’ Carlson started, ‘We gather here today, blessed as ever, under your watchful eye.  We thank you for this entrance into a whole new world, and we thank you for watching over us not only in this world that we share together today, but in the world that we all return to when we remove our Masks.  We pray that we may stay ever grateful for this new opportunity for education, and as always, for these new tools that you have inspired humans to create.  We thank you for the community these tools inspire and for the sense of belonging and kinship they allow us to feel toward each other and You.  We ask that you may further guide us in our pursuit of knowledge and that we may continue to learn and prosper with these new technologies.  We ask this in your name, and in the name of the Virtual Savior to come, Amen.’
‘Amen!’
‘We will have 15 minutes until the lobby closes.  If you wish, please stay around and speak about what you learned today.  I will be here if any of you have questions about the final.’
About a quarter of the students walked into the palm trees, out of sight.  Another quarter dove into the waves.  This representation of logging out provided a more realistic visual than the flash of light that might have been imagined by science fiction writers in the early century.  The remaining half of the students either went to talk with Mr. Carlson in a small group or stayed behind to talk with each other.
Charlie already knew how he wanted to spend his Extra Time.  As soon as the prayer circle finished, he had smiled and waved at a beautiful dark-skinned classmate across the circle, effectively welcoming her to talk with him when the day had finished.  Charlie, at 13, was admittedly awkward around girls, but something about the simulation gave him some extra confidence.
‘Hey Gamma,’ said Charlie when they finally met.
‘Hi Charlie.  How was your day?’
‘Oh, you know.  It’s school.  It’s not always fun, but the Lord provided this beautiful beach for us to learn on.  And we get to use what we learn to do the Lord’s work.  So it’s good.’
‘You sound like Mr. Carlson.’
‘Well, good!  Mr. Carlson is very smart!’
Gamma smiled.
‘So what are you going to do the rest of the day?’ Charlie asked her.
‘My dad wants me to help him outside.  It’s starting to snow, and he wants to put little sweaters on some of our trees.’
‘That’s cute.’
‘It’s a little silly—like, why have trees if they can’t grow on their own?  Isn’t that something trees are supposed to do?  But my dad tells me that even though God makes the weather we need, we still can’t assume it will be good for our trees.  He says that he wouldn’t put me out in the winter without a sweater, and the tree is like another kid, in a way.’
‘It’s really that cold where you’re at?’
‘Oh, you know, it’s not that cold.  But we get a little bit of snow around this time of year.  Especially over on the other side of the valley.  But it only really happens at night.  During the day it hardly ever goes below 50 degrees.’
‘It’s not cold at all where I live.’
‘Oh, where do you live?’
‘&^%#))@$!.’  Charlie could feel his lips move, but what he heard was a symphony of computerized beeps and blips.  It was one of the failsafe measures of the FTVRHS—you couldn’t swear and you couldn’t give away any personal information.
Gamma laughed.  ‘Oh yeah?  Sounds like a pretty tough place to grow up!’
Charlie laughed with her, but he had a feeling she could guess where he lived.  Just as it was obvious to him that she lived on the edge of town.  It made sense.  Gamma was beautiful in that way that he had noticed rich girls generally were.  And if she had indeed guessed he lived in South Jungle, he doubted he would ever have a chance.  But maybe, if it was God’s Will….
‘Oh!’ Gamma said, ‘We’re getting the five minute warning!  I think I’ll probably head out anyway.  My dad is waiting for me on the other side.  But it was nice talking to you, Charlie!  Maybe we can hang out sometime if we ever get play-date permission!’  Gamma squeezed Charlie’s hand goodbye, then ran into the waves and dove into the ocean.
Charlie accessed his own in-simulation menu by holding his arms out straight in front if him with his palms together, turning them ninety degrees, and spreading his arms apart vertically.  He placed his hand at the bottom of the menu, waving it over ‘Exit’.
Charlie’s screen went black and he removed his Lucid Mask.  His room was a much less attractive backdrop than the beach, that was for sure.  For one, he only had one small window—not much natural light.  He had a small bookshelf in the northeast corner of his room and a desk in the northwest corner.  His bed was leaned vertically against the wall, a measure he needed to take whenever he went into the Virtual Classroom.  Otherwise there just wasn’t enough room to walk around.  He slowly lowered his bed to the floor, lay on it, and looked at the ceiling, ready to contemplate the world.
Charlie had just barely begun his meditations when his mother simultaneously knocked and entered his room.  Charlie’s mother was still rather young, but she looked older than her age.  Though she had never been much for exercise, she certainly hadn’t treated her body well since Charlie’s birth, and at thirty, she was experiencing significant sagging in her gut and jowls.  She had kind eyes, but a hardened demeanor, and it was obvious she hadn’t come into Charlie’s room to catch up on his day.
‘Hey mom.’
‘Hi Charlie.  How was school.’
‘It was good.’  Charlie paused, planning to elaborate, but his mother continued before he could.
‘That’s good.  Hey, take five minutes or so, but then I need you to play some Mineshaft before dinner.’
Charlie liked video games, but after four hours in Virtual Reality, his eyes were rather tired.  Plus, even the most enjoyable activities feel less fun when they are forced upon you.
‘Hey!’  Charlie’s mom said.  His face must have given him away.  ‘How do you think we can afford a Mask for you in the first place?  How do you think we pay rent in here so you have a roof over your head?  And all I’m asking is an hour of your time, to play a video game.  Do you realize how lucky you have it?  This was not a thing when your grandfather was growing up, I’ll tell you that.  You couldn’t get paid to play video games for an hour.  But now that hour will buy us two nights of dinner.  So be grateful.  Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Charlie said.  ‘I am grateful, mom.  I’ll see you in an hour.’
‘Okay,’ his mother said and walked out of the room.  Charlie took a breath, tilted his bed back again the wall, and put his mask back on.  In his home menu, located in a room Charlie had set to a Japanese Dojo, Charlie waved his hand over the green cube with a big dollar sign over it.  The cube opened up, and three objects floated out.  He waved his hand over the one shaped like a pick-axe.
The Dojo disappeared, and Charlie was in a dark mineshaft.  About 200 feet ahead of him was a wall made purely of Gold.  So that was what he would be handling for the next hour, he thought.  A girl greeted him with a small cup of ore.  He took the cup from her and passed it on to the girl behind him.  He then received an empty cup from another boy behind him and passed it to the girl in front of him, who passed it up to the wall, where about 50 other individuals mined with pick axes.  This is what he would be doing for the next hour.  It wasn’t the most enthralling video game in the world, but at least he got paid for it.
Five people away, Charlie saw another boy remove a small sword from his back and decapitate a rat half his size as it pounced toward him.  Charlie shuddered.  There was something real about that aspect of the game.  He hoped he wouldn’t have to kill any rats today.  He took another cup from the girl in front of him and thought about Gamma, out in the sun, wisps of snow around her, putting knitted sweaters around young trees.
0 notes
zipgrowth · 7 years ago
Text
Can Individual Tests Really Measure Collaboration?
At the end of next school year, thousands of high school students will sit down at individual workstations, laptops in hand, for an end-of-course exam. But in a rather novel twist this one’s not just about what you know—but also what you can figure out.
That’s the idea at least behind the latest summative assessments from Project Lead the Way, a project-based STEM curriculum, which is introducing new tech-based question types to measure a raft of noncognitive skills from collaboration to general problem solving (in addition to subject-specific questions about engineering or coding concepts).
“We reflected and determined we had an opportunity to change the way we assess students to look and feel more like the in-classroom experience,” says Michelle Gough, a senior vice president for Project Lead the Way and its chief legal and assessment officer.
Is it important to measure those skills? The answer is yes, and they can be measured. Can you measure them with a single kid sitting in front of a computer? I think there’s more of a question about that.
Linda Darling-Hammond
Project Lead the Way, or PLTW as it’s known for short, is a K-12 STEM curriculum that’s big on hands-on learning and having groups of students co-design solutions to science and engineering problems. Challenges might include designing apparel for extreme climates or improving water recycling during a drought.
For much of its two-decade history, the Indianapolis-based nonprofit has offered end-of-course assessments for its three “pathway” courses on engineering, computer science or biomedical sciences. But those had traditionally focused on subject-specific skills, and were entirely multiple choice. The new soft-skill component, given online, will be taken by up to 400,000 K-12 students in more than 10,000 schools at the end of the 2018-19 school year.
Testing for such skills relies heavily on technology and required a significant retooling. Yet questions remain about whether any individual test (especially one that has long relied on multiple choice) can truly measure collaboration and problem solving—skills that typically involve heavy doses of human interaction and teamwork.
A Question on Testing
When building the new tests, PLTW gathered panels of industry experts, educators and psychometricians, or scientists who study how to make tests fair. Their goal? To infuse both real-world scenarios and academic standards into the new exams, as well as topics like leadership that college admissions reps would care about.
To bolster its claim that there needs to be more measurement around soft skills, PLTW pointed EdSurge to a 2014 research brief co-authored by Linda Darling-Hammond, an emeritus professor at Stanford and longtime policy researcher, which calls for adding more collaboration, communication and problem-solving to both curricula and accountability systems.
But the individual computerized assessments PLTW has built aren’t exactly what Darling-Hammond had in mind. “Is it important to measure those skills? The answer is yes, and they can be measured,” says Darling-Hammond, who now heads up the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute, in an interview with EdSurge. “Can you measure them with a single kid sitting in front of a computer? I think there’s more of a question about that.”
In place of individual tests, Darling-Hammond is a proponent of what’s known as performance assessments, which measure skills through hands-on tasks—the kind PLTW features in its curriculum but not its assessments.
Some countries, such as Singapore and parts of Australia, use performance assessments as alternatives or complements to high-stakes testing. Typically they involve giving students a task to complete around designing an investigation or solving a problem. (Several U.S. states like New York and Kentucky feature them too). In some cases they’re collaborative, asking groups of students to test and present their solution together and write up their findings and contributions separately.
“There is real work on real problems, which are going to be much more transferable to the real-world situations that we want kids to be prepared for,” Darling-Hammond says.
Such approaches take training, resources and time, in addition to buy-in from districts, states and educators. But Gough maintains that group work isn’t ideal for individual assessments. Even if answers are recorded individually, she says, it’s too difficult to discern whether students contributed equally or if skill levels within the group are even comparable (which would “muddy the data,” she adds).
Technology-Enhanced
What’s easier to agree on is that multiple-choice questions are a poor way to measure soft skills. Darling-Hammond says the format is rarely used outside the U.S, where it’s unusually popular. “In scoring a multiple-choice test, just about every dollar after the first is profit for the commercial testing company,” she says, “whereas scoring a test where you've got open-ended answers requires that you train teachers to do scoring.”
There often isn’t a completely right or completely wrong answer—there is usually a best answer
Michelle Gough
For the new tests PLTW didn’t ditch multiple choice entirely, but rather added what it calls “technology-enhanced items,” which began cropping up a few years ago on national and international high-stakes assessments, including PISA and Smarter Balanced. This new breed of tech-laden items lets students answer questions through drag and drop, highlighting text or fill-in-the-blanks.
The PLTW tests also include situational-judgement items or hypothetical scenarios where students have to weigh options and come to decisions after reading a passage or watching a video vignette (e.g. “You are conducting an experiment and you realize your data has been corrupted…”). Developed by psychologists to test skills like leadership, they often feature multiple choice-like lists or the ability to rank options in order from, say, the most to least appropriate response. Depending on their answers, there is typically an opportunity for students to pick up at least partial credit on the PLTW tests, Gough says, “because there often isn’t a completely right or completely wrong answer—there is usually a best answer.”
Still, they may suffer from the same limitations that make typical multiple choice items problematic. “You can always eliminate the stupid answers,” Darling-Hammond says of situational-judgement items. “You could know the right answer without being a good collaborator in any sense yourself.”
AI Steps In
Barring actual student-to-student interaction, a better way to gauge soft skills is to simulate collaboration as closely as possible. In 2015, for the first time the PISA exam—given to 15-year-olds around the world—sought to measure individual and collaborative problem solving. It also introduced an AI-powered avatar that students interact with to complete a particular task, such as flying a rocket to the moon when you only control one aspect of the project (and thus must work closely with the AI).
“The idea was to see to what extent students would collaborate without an identified solution strategy, and to what extent they can overcome problems and difficulties,” says Andreas Schleicher, a director at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which oversees PISA. “None of the problems we gave students required a lot of content knowledge or problem-solving expertise. It was all about the willingness and capacity of students to jointly manage problem situations.”
As part of its broad research into test design, PLTW presented the PISA approach to its panel and ended up adopting a similar AI scenario—a “simulated interaction,” Gough calls it—on the end-of-course exam for biomedical science students, who will interact with a virtual patient. It’s an approach not without its problems, Darling-Hammond says. But, she adds, it’s “a step in the right direction, and it's certainly a big step beyond multiple-choice testing.”
Setting Up for Success
Three years after giving its own collaboration-themed test to U.S. students, Schleicher says American students came off rather average when it came to those skill sets, placing 13th out of more than 50 countries.
“If you rank American students internationally in collaborative problem solving they don’t come off that well,” he says, before adding that it’s important to look at the bigger picture. “Americans did better on collaborative than they did on individual problem solving.”
But those taking PISA tests come from a broad range of schools, whereas those taking the new PLTW exams will have just completed a project-based learning curriculum focused not only on STEM but also on preparing them for real-world collaboration experiences. PLTW students therefore might be expected to score better on soft skill tests and thus look more attractive to their post-secondary prospects.
“We have a lot of research about how students who do PLTW are the students that are completing college, not changing majors,” Gough says. “It isn’t just the development of subject-matter skills, it's the implication of these transportable skills—the perseverance, problem solving...that has allowed them to be successful.”
Can Individual Tests Really Measure Collaboration? published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness
0 notes
growthvue · 7 years ago
Text
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Mary Howard on episode 293 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
Mary Howard’s students build and learn in Open Sim, a virtual world like Second Life. From building architectural constructs to understanding the Diary of Anne Frank, literature comes alive in this virtual world.
On April 26, celebrate PowerofEcon on Twitter with Discovery Education, CME Group, and their Econ Essentials Program. We’ll have free resources available for downloading. To join the celebration, tune into the Twitter chat with me, fellow teachers, and the CME Group’s chief economist on April 26th at noon Eastern Time, using #PowerofEcon.
Visit www.coolcatteacher.com/econ for more information and remember to tweet out your pics about how you teach your students using #PowerofEcon.
Listen Now
Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher
Stream by clicking here.
***
Enhanced Transcript
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Link to show: https://ift.tt/2JWcxRi Date: April 18, 2018
Vicki: Today we’re talking with Mary Howard sixth grade teacher in New York State. She was a finalist for New York State Teacher of the Year for this year, 2018.
Mary, you are bringing literature to life in Open Sim.
Other resources:
Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education
Web 3D: Students Using OpenSim Reflect on the Pressing Issues that We All Ask About Using Virtual Worlds
Simple Virtual Reality in the Classroom with Google Streetview and Google Cardboard
You and I were actually talking before the show. I used to do some work at Open SIm, and people really pushed me toward Unity. I found it to be really hard.
What is Open Sim? It sounds like there are still people using it, huh?
What is Open Sim, and is anyone still using it?
Mary: Yeah, there’s still quite a few educators, especially out in the trenches, using Open Sim.
Sometimes it’s a hard concept to describe. It’s a virtual environment.
We hear a lot of talk now in Ed Tech circles about how we can get these students engaged and speak a language that they’re speaking. Really an Open Sim (simulator) is a great way to do that.
We bring these students into a virtual world. They have an avatar, and the avatar walks around this virtual world. Then I incorporate my curriculum through the virtual environment. It’s really exciting stuff!
Vicki: So educators, think about (how) some people host their own Minecraft servers. This is in some ways like Second Life. It looks a little bit more realistic than the pixelated Minecraft types. A lot of really cool things you can do in Open Sim, even though some people have pushed toward Unity.
So what are you doing with Anne Frank and teaching literature in you Open Sim world, Mary?
Mary: Yes! Well, the students have this world that they go into. The platform is held at a server with our local district.
Like you described, just to give people a little more of a background, it’s really great for middle schoolers, because by the time they’ve hit sixth and seventh grade, a lot of them have moved on beyond Minecraft, or they really can’t get their heads around the fact that a teacher is using Minecraft.
I always say to the students, “It’s like Minecraft on steroids. We’ve gone away from the pixelation, yet we still have the power of the building and construction,” which really speaks to students’ creativity.
Open Sim is like Minecraft on steroids
So in the program that I use, the Anne Frank house was actually re-designed in the virtual environment for the students to visit. So they go into a reconstructed Anne Frank house.
They read, of course, the companion novel that goes along with it, and they’re able to sort of “see” and visualize what’s going on in the novel.
Yet they’re also able to build and construct their own reflective pieces within the virtual environment. In one case, a student actually built a World War II bomber and placed that in the Anne Frank Museum that’s in the virtual world.
So, there are just so many ways to be more hhands-onwith the novel when you’re using a virtual environment.
Vicki: What are some of the things that students are really taking away, that you couldn’t get from just a class discussion about Anne Frank?
Mary: Well, it’s really an engagement practice.
The virtual environment group that I work with — this Open Sim group — I actually don’t do the Anne Frank house.
I do an extension off of that, which came from the initial project. It was a three-year project. Several teachers began the Anne Frank that’s actually in our seventh and eighth grade curriculum in our building.
But then I began the project in this Open Sim environment with “An Era of the King.”
So you sort of have to imagine the Middle Ages and Medieval Times, which is the curriculum that I teach.
Teaching the Middle Ages in a virtual environment
It’s great to teach the Middle Ages to begin with — you have your knights and kings and queens and castles — but it’s even better when you can bring them there!
So I had thirty kids in the computer lab. They’re all in there as an avatar, wearing Middle Ages clothing, walking around a Middle Ages village.
Then of course, the curriculum is gamified, so they have different levels of challenges that they have to engage in — which are knowledge based — in order to learn the curriculum, but also succeed in the virtual world.
So when you asks questions about what do the students get out of it? It’s just this whole package of things. It’s taking curriculum, making it engaging and exciting. and putting it at a level where the students are genuinely coming from nowadays
Vicki: So you’ve been using this for a while. Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past?
Are there any mistakes we can avoid?
Mary: Oh goodness, yes! (laughs)
That conversation could even be longer than the successes. (laughs)
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: I think that just comes with technology. People ask me, “How do you do all this tech stuff?”
And the first words I say are, “Be fearless.” You have to just be willing to let it go and be willing to understand that mistakes and accidents will happen.
Our first experience, the very first time… I was so excited to get these students in the Open SImulator. We sat there on laptops in a classroom, and I tried to get all 25 students online at the exact same time.
We overloaded our system. No one could get on. Everybody was raising their hands and kind of whining, “It’s not working. It won’t let me in.”
It was just one of those high stress moments like, “Oh no. This is an absolute disaster.”
And those are going to happen.
As you know as a tech person, you really have to be fearless and just understand, it’s going to happen. But you can’t break the children.
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: (laughs) They’re going to be fine.
Vicki: And, it’s a learning process. I remember one thing I had learned is to try to get the kids in ahead of time to create their avatars, just because that tends to put some strain on things, and you know, it just takes time to learn this stuff.
So what have you done right, Mary? What’s one of the big things that you’re like, “Yes, this has made a huge difference.
What is your favorite project, where you knew you totally got this right?
Mary: Oh, I love that question!
Well, I think my favorite project was that we did in the virtual environments is a project combined with our local community. We have a Darwin Martin house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright build here in Buffalo. There’s a huge Frank Lloyd Wright connection in Buffalo
I worked with a local BOCES person to set up an opportunity for the students to actually build in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We gave (the students) (virtual) land, and we gave them an opportunity to learn about the architectural principles behind Frank Lloyd Wright.
Then we took them on a field trip to the Darwin Martin house.
As we were walking around the Darwin Martin house after spending a couple of weeks discussing the architectural principles and researching Frank Lloyd Wright and what he does, seeing and hearing ten year olds say things like, “Look at that abstract design,” or “See how he incorporated this central hearth in this home.”
Hearing that language manifest itself right on site, but then going back to the virtual environment when we got back to school, and seeing the excitement that the students had, designing and creating homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright form…
It was just the most magnificent and rewarding project that I think I’ve ever done with students. It’s just a really exciting thing to see what the students could build and design when you let them go, and let their creativity blossom.
Vicki: OK, Mary, to all the teachers listening to you… Give them some encouragement to try something virtual.
I mean, there are so many ways you can do this. There’s Open Sim, of course there’s Minecraft.
Some people are doing the Google Expeditions, and that’s great. But we need to understand here the differences. They can actually build. They can sandbox. They can create.
Mary: Yeah…
Vicki: There is a difference between experiencing something and creating something.
So, what’s your pep talk to teachers for utilizing this type of immersive technology?
Why should teachers try something like Open Sim?
Mary: I think we spend a lot of time saying that our equipment can’t handle it, or our tech department can’t handle it, or our filters won’t allow that to happen.
And I also say, “Be that rogue teacher.”
You know, be the lady in the corner of the building that has all the cats, because if you are that person, you take the lead.
Your tech department will find a way to make these things happen. And once it happens, the explosion in creativity is so worth it.
We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over using technology as, “Oh, I have to INSERT that into my curriculum. Or I have to add that onto my curriculum.”
And it’s really a paradigm shift.
You have to realize that it IS the curriculum.
It is going to generate all of that critical thinking, and all of that inferring, and all of those (things like) “tolerating ambiguity” and all of those buzzwords that we have that we want our students to do.
This one element happens.
If you get out there and explore and make it happen, all of that other stuff that you’ve been worried about with your students?
It falls into place.
Vicki: That is great advice for us, remarkable teachers!
Now get out there it make it happen!
Mary: Yeah! (laughs)
  Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford: [email protected]
Bio as submitted
Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Western New York State and was a finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year for 2018. She considers herself a FEARLESS educator and an early adopter of many EdTech initiatives. Mary attempts to create a culture of inquiry in her classroom and hopes to build future innovators Her blog, http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com features many of her EdTech pursuits including an Augmented Reality Sandbox that she uses in her classroom, makerspaces, coding as well as the use of Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments in her classroom. Mary is also a specialist in engagement, and uses digital tools to engage students and ignite their learning. She has presented throughout New York State and numerous other conferences including MACUL (Michigan) and at ISTE Philadelphia, Denver and San Antonio.
Blog: http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mrshoward118
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.
The post Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim published first on https://getnewdlbusiness.tumblr.com/
0 notes
patriciaanderson357-blog · 7 years ago
Text
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Mary Howard on episode 293 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
Mary Howard’s students build and learn in Open Sim, a virtual world like Second Life. From building architectural constructs to understanding the Diary of Anne Frank, literature comes alive in this virtual world.
On April 26, celebrate PowerofEcon on Twitter with Discovery Education, CME Group, and their Econ Essentials Program. We’ll have free resources available for downloading. To join the celebration, tune into the Twitter chat with me, fellow teachers, and the CME Group’s chief economist on April 26th at noon Eastern Time, using #PowerofEcon.
Visit www.coolcatteacher.com/econ for more information and remember to tweet out your pics about how you teach your students using #PowerofEcon.
Listen Now
Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher
Stream by clicking here.
***
Enhanced Transcript
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Link to show: www.coolcatteacher.com/e293 Date: April 18, 2018
Vicki: Today we’re talking with Mary Howard sixth grade teacher in New York State. She was a finalist for New York State Teacher of the Year for this year, 2018.
Mary, you are bringing literature to life in Open Sim.
Other resources:
Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education
Web 3D: Students Using OpenSim Reflect on the Pressing Issues that We All Ask About Using Virtual Worlds
Simple Virtual Reality in the Classroom with Google Streetview and Google Cardboard
You and I were actually talking before the show. I used to do some work at Open SIm, and people really pushed me toward Unity. I found it to be really hard.
What is Open Sim? It sounds like there are still people using it, huh?
What is Open Sim, and is anyone still using it?
Mary: Yeah, there’s still quite a few educators, especially out in the trenches, using Open Sim.
Sometimes it’s a hard concept to describe. It’s a virtual environment.
We hear a lot of talk now in Ed Tech circles about how we can get these students engaged and speak a language that they’re speaking. Really an Open Sim (simulator) is a great way to do that.
We bring these students into a virtual world. They have an avatar, and the avatar walks around this virtual world. Then I incorporate my curriculum through the virtual environment. It’s really exciting stuff!
Vicki: So educators, think about (how) some people host their own Minecraft servers. This is in some ways like Second Life. It looks a little bit more realistic than the pixelated Minecraft types. A lot of really cool things you can do in Open Sim, even though some people have pushed toward Unity.
So what are you doing with Anne Frank and teaching literature in you Open Sim world, Mary?
Mary: Yes! Well, the students have this world that they go into. The platform is held at a server with our local district.
Like you described, just to give people a little more of a background, it’s really great for middle schoolers, because by the time they’ve hit sixth and seventh grade, a lot of them have moved on beyond Minecraft, or they really can’t get their heads around the fact that a teacher is using Minecraft.
I always say to the students, “It’s like Minecraft on steroids. We’ve gone away from the pixelation, yet we still have the power of the building and construction,” which really speaks to students’ creativity.
Open Sim is like Minecraft on steroids
So in the program that I use, the Anne Frank house was actually re-designed in the virtual environment for the students to visit. So they go into a reconstructed Anne Frank house.
They read, of course, the companion novel that goes along with it, and they’re able to sort of “see” and visualize what’s going on in the novel.
Yet they’re also able to build and construct their own reflective pieces within the virtual environment. In one case, a student actually built a World War II bomber and placed that in the Anne Frank Museum that’s in the virtual world.
So, there are just so many ways to be more hhands-onwith the novel when you’re using a virtual environment.
Vicki: What are some of the things that students are really taking away, that you couldn’t get from just a class discussion about Anne Frank?
Mary: Well, it’s really an engagement practice.
The virtual environment group that I work with — this Open Sim group — I actually don’t do the Anne Frank house.
I do an extension off of that, which came from the initial project. It was a three-year project. Several teachers began the Anne Frank that’s actually in our seventh and eighth grade curriculum in our building.
But then I began the project in this Open Sim environment with “An Era of the King.”
So you sort of have to imagine the Middle Ages and Medieval Times, which is the curriculum that I teach.
Teaching the Middle Ages in a virtual environment
It’s great to teach the Middle Ages to begin with — you have your knights and kings and queens and castles — but it’s even better when you can bring them there!
So I had thirty kids in the computer lab. They’re all in there as an avatar, wearing Middle Ages clothing, walking around a Middle Ages village.
Then of course, the curriculum is gamified, so they have different levels of challenges that they have to engage in — which are knowledge based — in order to learn the curriculum, but also succeed in the virtual world.
So when you asks questions about what do the students get out of it? It’s just this whole package of things. It’s taking curriculum, making it engaging and exciting. and putting it at a level where the students are genuinely coming from nowadays
Vicki: So you’ve been using this for a while. Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past?
Are there any mistakes we can avoid?
Mary: Oh goodness, yes! (laughs)
That conversation could even be longer than the successes. (laughs)
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: I think that just comes with technology. People ask me, “How do you do all this tech stuff?”
And the first words I say are, “Be fearless.” You have to just be willing to let it go and be willing to understand that mistakes and accidents will happen.
Our first experience, the very first time… I was so excited to get these students in the Open SImulator. We sat there on laptops in a classroom, and I tried to get all 25 students online at the exact same time.
We overloaded our system. No one could get on. Everybody was raising their hands and kind of whining, “It’s not working. It won’t let me in.”
It was just one of those high stress moments like, “Oh no. This is an absolute disaster.”
And those are going to happen.
As you know as a tech person, you really have to be fearless and just understand, it’s going to happen. But you can’t break the children.
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: (laughs) They’re going to be fine.
Vicki: And, it’s a learning process. I remember one thing I had learned is to try to get the kids in ahead of time to create their avatars, just because that tends to put some strain on things, and you know, it just takes time to learn this stuff.
So what have you done right, Mary? What’s one of the big things that you’re like, “Yes, this has made a huge difference.
What is your favorite project, where you knew you totally got this right?
Mary: Oh, I love that question!
Well, I think my favorite project was that we did in the virtual environments is a project combined with our local community. We have a Darwin Martin house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright build here in Buffalo. There’s a huge Frank Lloyd Wright connection in Buffalo
I worked with a local BOCES person to set up an opportunity for the students to actually build in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We gave (the students) (virtual) land, and we gave them an opportunity to learn about the architectural principles behind Frank Lloyd Wright.
Then we took them on a field trip to the Darwin Martin house.
As we were walking around the Darwin Martin house after spending a couple of weeks discussing the architectural principles and researching Frank Lloyd Wright and what he does, seeing and hearing ten year olds say things like, “Look at that abstract design,” or “See how he incorporated this central hearth in this home.”
Hearing that language manifest itself right on site, but then going back to the virtual environment when we got back to school, and seeing the excitement that the students had, designing and creating homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright form…
It was just the most magnificent and rewarding project that I think I’ve ever done with students. It’s just a really exciting thing to see what the students could build and design when you let them go, and let their creativity blossom.
Vicki: OK, Mary, to all the teachers listening to you… Give them some encouragement to try something virtual.
I mean, there are so many ways you can do this. There’s Open Sim, of course there’s Minecraft.
Some people are doing the Google Expeditions, and that’s great. But we need to understand here the differences. They can actually build. They can sandbox. They can create.
Mary: Yeah…
Vicki: There is a difference between experiencing something and creating something.
So, what’s your pep talk to teachers for utilizing this type of immersive technology?
Why should teachers try something like Open Sim?
Mary: I think we spend a lot of time saying that our equipment can’t handle it, or our tech department can’t handle it, or our filters won’t allow that to happen.
And I also say, “Be that rogue teacher.”
You know, be the lady in the corner of the building that has all the cats, because if you are that person, you take the lead.
Your tech department will find a way to make these things happen. And once it happens, the explosion in creativity is so worth it.
We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over using technology as, “Oh, I have to INSERT that into my curriculum. Or I have to add that onto my curriculum.”
And it’s really a paradigm shift.
You have to realize that it IS the curriculum.
It is going to generate all of that critical thinking, and all of that inferring, and all of those (things like) “tolerating ambiguity” and all of those buzzwords that we have that we want our students to do.
This one element happens.
If you get out there and explore and make it happen, all of that other stuff that you’ve been worried about with your students?
It falls into place.
Vicki: That is great advice for us, remarkable teachers!
Now get out there it make it happen!
Mary: Yeah! (laughs)
  Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford: [email protected]
Bio as submitted
Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Western New York State and was a finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year for 2018. She considers herself a FEARLESS educator and an early adopter of many EdTech initiatives. Mary attempts to create a culture of inquiry in her classroom and hopes to build future innovators Her blog, http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com features many of her EdTech pursuits including an Augmented Reality Sandbox that she uses in her classroom, makerspaces, coding as well as the use of Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments in her classroom. Mary is also a specialist in engagement, and uses digital tools to engage students and ignite their learning. She has presented throughout New York State and numerous other conferences including MACUL (Michigan) and at ISTE Philadelphia, Denver and San Antonio.
Blog: http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mrshoward118
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.
The post Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
0 notes
aira26soonas · 7 years ago
Text
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Mary Howard on episode 293 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
Mary Howard’s students build and learn in Open Sim, a virtual world like Second Life. From building architectural constructs to understanding the Diary of Anne Frank, literature comes alive in this virtual world.
On April 26, celebrate PowerofEcon on Twitter with Discovery Education, CME Group, and their Econ Essentials Program. We’ll have free resources available for downloading. To join the celebration, tune into the Twitter chat with me, fellow teachers, and the CME Group’s chief economist on April 26th at noon Eastern Time, using #PowerofEcon.
Visit www.coolcatteacher.com/econ for more information and remember to tweet out your pics about how you teach your students using #PowerofEcon.
Listen Now
Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher
Stream by clicking here.
***
Enhanced Transcript
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Link to show: www.coolcatteacher.com/e293 Date: April 18, 2018
Vicki: Today we’re talking with Mary Howard sixth grade teacher in New York State. She was a finalist for New York State Teacher of the Year for this year, 2018.
Mary, you are bringing literature to life in Open Sim.
Other resources:
Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education
Web 3D: Students Using OpenSim Reflect on the Pressing Issues that We All Ask About Using Virtual Worlds
Simple Virtual Reality in the Classroom with Google Streetview and Google Cardboard
You and I were actually talking before the show. I used to do some work at Open SIm, and people really pushed me toward Unity. I found it to be really hard.
What is Open Sim? It sounds like there are still people using it, huh?
What is Open Sim, and is anyone still using it?
Mary: Yeah, there’s still quite a few educators, especially out in the trenches, using Open Sim.
Sometimes it’s a hard concept to describe. It’s a virtual environment.
We hear a lot of talk now in Ed Tech circles about how we can get these students engaged and speak a language that they’re speaking. Really an Open Sim (simulator) is a great way to do that.
We bring these students into a virtual world. They have an avatar, and the avatar walks around this virtual world. Then I incorporate my curriculum through the virtual environment. It’s really exciting stuff!
Vicki: So educators, think about (how) some people host their own Minecraft servers. This is in some ways like Second Life. It looks a little bit more realistic than the pixelated Minecraft types. A lot of really cool things you can do in Open Sim, even though some people have pushed toward Unity.
So what are you doing with Anne Frank and teaching literature in you Open Sim world, Mary?
Mary: Yes! Well, the students have this world that they go into. The platform is held at a server with our local district.
Like you described, just to give people a little more of a background, it’s really great for middle schoolers, because by the time they’ve hit sixth and seventh grade, a lot of them have moved on beyond Minecraft, or they really can’t get their heads around the fact that a teacher is using Minecraft.
I always say to the students, “It’s like Minecraft on steroids. We’ve gone away from the pixelation, yet we still have the power of the building and construction,” which really speaks to students’ creativity.
Open Sim is like Minecraft on steroids
So in the program that I use, the Anne Frank house was actually re-designed in the virtual environment for the students to visit. So they go into a reconstructed Anne Frank house.
They read, of course, the companion novel that goes along with it, and they’re able to sort of “see” and visualize what’s going on in the novel.
Yet they’re also able to build and construct their own reflective pieces within the virtual environment. In one case, a student actually built a World War II bomber and placed that in the Anne Frank Museum that’s in the virtual world.
So, there are just so many ways to be more hhands-onwith the novel when you’re using a virtual environment.
Vicki: What are some of the things that students are really taking away, that you couldn’t get from just a class discussion about Anne Frank?
Mary: Well, it’s really an engagement practice.
The virtual environment group that I work with — this Open Sim group — I actually don’t do the Anne Frank house.
I do an extension off of that, which came from the initial project. It was a three-year project. Several teachers began the Anne Frank that’s actually in our seventh and eighth grade curriculum in our building.
But then I began the project in this Open Sim environment with “An Era of the King.”
So you sort of have to imagine the Middle Ages and Medieval Times, which is the curriculum that I teach.
Teaching the Middle Ages in a virtual environment
It’s great to teach the Middle Ages to begin with — you have your knights and kings and queens and castles — but it’s even better when you can bring them there!
So I had thirty kids in the computer lab. They’re all in there as an avatar, wearing Middle Ages clothing, walking around a Middle Ages village.
Then of course, the curriculum is gamified, so they have different levels of challenges that they have to engage in — which are knowledge based — in order to learn the curriculum, but also succeed in the virtual world.
So when you asks questions about what do the students get out of it? It’s just this whole package of things. It’s taking curriculum, making it engaging and exciting. and putting it at a level where the students are genuinely coming from nowadays
Vicki: So you’ve been using this for a while. Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past?
Are there any mistakes we can avoid?
Mary: Oh goodness, yes! (laughs)
That conversation could even be longer than the successes. (laughs)
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: I think that just comes with technology. People ask me, “How do you do all this tech stuff?”
And the first words I say are, “Be fearless.” You have to just be willing to let it go and be willing to understand that mistakes and accidents will happen.
Our first experience, the very first time… I was so excited to get these students in the Open SImulator. We sat there on laptops in a classroom, and I tried to get all 25 students online at the exact same time.
We overloaded our system. No one could get on. Everybody was raising their hands and kind of whining, “It’s not working. It won’t let me in.”
It was just one of those high stress moments like, “Oh no. This is an absolute disaster.”
And those are going to happen.
As you know as a tech person, you really have to be fearless and just understand, it’s going to happen. But you can’t break the children.
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: (laughs) They’re going to be fine.
Vicki: And, it’s a learning process. I remember one thing I had learned is to try to get the kids in ahead of time to create their avatars, just because that tends to put some strain on things, and you know, it just takes time to learn this stuff.
So what have you done right, Mary? What’s one of the big things that you’re like, “Yes, this has made a huge difference.
What is your favorite project, where you knew you totally got this right?
Mary: Oh, I love that question!
Well, I think my favorite project was that we did in the virtual environments is a project combined with our local community. We have a Darwin Martin house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright build here in Buffalo. There’s a huge Frank Lloyd Wright connection in Buffalo
I worked with a local BOCES person to set up an opportunity for the students to actually build in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We gave (the students) (virtual) land, and we gave them an opportunity to learn about the architectural principles behind Frank Lloyd Wright.
Then we took them on a field trip to the Darwin Martin house.
As we were walking around the Darwin Martin house after spending a couple of weeks discussing the architectural principles and researching Frank Lloyd Wright and what he does, seeing and hearing ten year olds say things like, “Look at that abstract design,” or “See how he incorporated this central hearth in this home.”
Hearing that language manifest itself right on site, but then going back to the virtual environment when we got back to school, and seeing the excitement that the students had, designing and creating homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright form…
It was just the most magnificent and rewarding project that I think I’ve ever done with students. It’s just a really exciting thing to see what the students could build and design when you let them go, and let their creativity blossom.
Vicki: OK, Mary, to all the teachers listening to you… Give them some encouragement to try something virtual.
I mean, there are so many ways you can do this. There’s Open Sim, of course there’s Minecraft.
Some people are doing the Google Expeditions, and that’s great. But we need to understand here the differences. They can actually build. They can sandbox. They can create.
Mary: Yeah…
Vicki: There is a difference between experiencing something and creating something.
So, what’s your pep talk to teachers for utilizing this type of immersive technology?
Why should teachers try something like Open Sim?
Mary: I think we spend a lot of time saying that our equipment can’t handle it, or our tech department can’t handle it, or our filters won’t allow that to happen.
And I also say, “Be that rogue teacher.”
You know, be the lady in the corner of the building that has all the cats, because if you are that person, you take the lead.
Your tech department will find a way to make these things happen. And once it happens, the explosion in creativity is so worth it.
We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over using technology as, “Oh, I have to INSERT that into my curriculum. Or I have to add that onto my curriculum.”
And it’s really a paradigm shift.
You have to realize that it IS the curriculum.
It is going to generate all of that critical thinking, and all of that inferring, and all of those (things like) “tolerating ambiguity” and all of those buzzwords that we have that we want our students to do.
This one element happens.
If you get out there and explore and make it happen, all of that other stuff that you’ve been worried about with your students?
It falls into place.
Vicki: That is great advice for us, remarkable teachers!
Now get out there it make it happen!
Mary: Yeah! (laughs)
  Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford: [email protected]
Bio as submitted
Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Western New York State and was a finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year for 2018. She considers herself a FEARLESS educator and an early adopter of many EdTech initiatives. Mary attempts to create a culture of inquiry in her classroom and hopes to build future innovators Her blog, http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com features many of her EdTech pursuits including an Augmented Reality Sandbox that she uses in her classroom, makerspaces, coding as well as the use of Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments in her classroom. Mary is also a specialist in engagement, and uses digital tools to engage students and ignite their learning. She has presented throughout New York State and numerous other conferences including MACUL (Michigan) and at ISTE Philadelphia, Denver and San Antonio.
Blog: http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mrshoward118
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.
The post Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e293/
0 notes
athena29stone · 7 years ago
Text
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Mary Howard on episode 293 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast
From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter
Mary Howard’s students build and learn in Open Sim, a virtual world like Second Life. From building architectural constructs to understanding the Diary of Anne Frank, literature comes alive in this virtual world.
On April 26, celebrate PowerofEcon on Twitter with Discovery Education, CME Group, and their Econ Essentials Program. We’ll have free resources available for downloading. To join the celebration, tune into the Twitter chat with me, fellow teachers, and the CME Group’s chief economist on April 26th at noon Eastern Time, using #PowerofEcon.
Visit www.coolcatteacher.com/econ for more information and remember to tweet out your pics about how you teach your students using #PowerofEcon.
Listen Now
Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher
Stream by clicking here.
***
Enhanced Transcript
Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim
Link to show: www.coolcatteacher.com/e293 Date: April 18, 2018
Vicki: Today we’re talking with Mary Howard sixth grade teacher in New York State. She was a finalist for New York State Teacher of the Year for this year, 2018.
Mary, you are bringing literature to life in Open Sim.
Other resources:
Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education
Web 3D: Students Using OpenSim Reflect on the Pressing Issues that We All Ask About Using Virtual Worlds
Simple Virtual Reality in the Classroom with Google Streetview and Google Cardboard
You and I were actually talking before the show. I used to do some work at Open SIm, and people really pushed me toward Unity. I found it to be really hard.
What is Open Sim? It sounds like there are still people using it, huh?
What is Open Sim, and is anyone still using it?
Mary: Yeah, there’s still quite a few educators, especially out in the trenches, using Open Sim.
Sometimes it’s a hard concept to describe. It’s a virtual environment.
We hear a lot of talk now in Ed Tech circles about how we can get these students engaged and speak a language that they’re speaking. Really an Open Sim (simulator) is a great way to do that.
We bring these students into a virtual world. They have an avatar, and the avatar walks around this virtual world. Then I incorporate my curriculum through the virtual environment. It’s really exciting stuff!
Vicki: So educators, think about (how) some people host their own Minecraft servers. This is in some ways like Second Life. It looks a little bit more realistic than the pixelated Minecraft types. A lot of really cool things you can do in Open Sim, even though some people have pushed toward Unity.
So what are you doing with Anne Frank and teaching literature in you Open Sim world, Mary?
Mary: Yes! Well, the students have this world that they go into. The platform is held at a server with our local district.
Like you described, just to give people a little more of a background, it’s really great for middle schoolers, because by the time they’ve hit sixth and seventh grade, a lot of them have moved on beyond Minecraft, or they really can’t get their heads around the fact that a teacher is using Minecraft.
I always say to the students, “It’s like Minecraft on steroids. We’ve gone away from the pixelation, yet we still have the power of the building and construction,” which really speaks to students’ creativity.
Open Sim is like Minecraft on steroids
So in the program that I use, the Anne Frank house was actually re-designed in the virtual environment for the students to visit. So they go into a reconstructed Anne Frank house.
They read, of course, the companion novel that goes along with it, and they’re able to sort of “see” and visualize what’s going on in the novel.
Yet they’re also able to build and construct their own reflective pieces within the virtual environment. In one case, a student actually built a World War II bomber and placed that in the Anne Frank Museum that’s in the virtual world.
So, there are just so many ways to be more hhands-onwith the novel when you’re using a virtual environment.
Vicki: What are some of the things that students are really taking away, that you couldn’t get from just a class discussion about Anne Frank?
Mary: Well, it’s really an engagement practice.
The virtual environment group that I work with — this Open Sim group — I actually don’t do the Anne Frank house.
I do an extension off of that, which came from the initial project. It was a three-year project. Several teachers began the Anne Frank that’s actually in our seventh and eighth grade curriculum in our building.
But then I began the project in this Open Sim environment with “An Era of the King.”
So you sort of have to imagine the Middle Ages and Medieval Times, which is the curriculum that I teach.
Teaching the Middle Ages in a virtual environment
It’s great to teach the Middle Ages to begin with — you have your knights and kings and queens and castles — but it’s even better when you can bring them there!
So I had thirty kids in the computer lab. They’re all in there as an avatar, wearing Middle Ages clothing, walking around a Middle Ages village.
Then of course, the curriculum is gamified, so they have different levels of challenges that they have to engage in — which are knowledge based — in order to learn the curriculum, but also succeed in the virtual world.
So when you asks questions about what do the students get out of it? It’s just this whole package of things. It’s taking curriculum, making it engaging and exciting. and putting it at a level where the students are genuinely coming from nowadays
Vicki: So you’ve been using this for a while. Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past?
Are there any mistakes we can avoid?
Mary: Oh goodness, yes! (laughs)
That conversation could even be longer than the successes. (laughs)
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: I think that just comes with technology. People ask me, “How do you do all this tech stuff?”
And the first words I say are, “Be fearless.” You have to just be willing to let it go and be willing to understand that mistakes and accidents will happen.
Our first experience, the very first time… I was so excited to get these students in the Open SImulator. We sat there on laptops in a classroom, and I tried to get all 25 students online at the exact same time.
We overloaded our system. No one could get on. Everybody was raising their hands and kind of whining, “It’s not working. It won’t let me in.”
It was just one of those high stress moments like, “Oh no. This is an absolute disaster.”
And those are going to happen.
As you know as a tech person, you really have to be fearless and just understand, it’s going to happen. But you can’t break the children.
Vicki: (laughs)
Mary: (laughs) They’re going to be fine.
Vicki: And, it’s a learning process. I remember one thing I had learned is to try to get the kids in ahead of time to create their avatars, just because that tends to put some strain on things, and you know, it just takes time to learn this stuff.
So what have you done right, Mary? What’s one of the big things that you’re like, “Yes, this has made a huge difference.
What is your favorite project, where you knew you totally got this right?
Mary: Oh, I love that question!
Well, I think my favorite project was that we did in the virtual environments is a project combined with our local community. We have a Darwin Martin house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright build here in Buffalo. There’s a huge Frank Lloyd Wright connection in Buffalo
I worked with a local BOCES person to set up an opportunity for the students to actually build in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
We gave (the students) (virtual) land, and we gave them an opportunity to learn about the architectural principles behind Frank Lloyd Wright.
Then we took them on a field trip to the Darwin Martin house.
As we were walking around the Darwin Martin house after spending a couple of weeks discussing the architectural principles and researching Frank Lloyd Wright and what he does, seeing and hearing ten year olds say things like, “Look at that abstract design,” or “See how he incorporated this central hearth in this home.”
Hearing that language manifest itself right on site, but then going back to the virtual environment when we got back to school, and seeing the excitement that the students had, designing and creating homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright form…
It was just the most magnificent and rewarding project that I think I’ve ever done with students. It’s just a really exciting thing to see what the students could build and design when you let them go, and let their creativity blossom.
Vicki: OK, Mary, to all the teachers listening to you… Give them some encouragement to try something virtual.
I mean, there are so many ways you can do this. There’s Open Sim, of course there’s Minecraft.
Some people are doing the Google Expeditions, and that’s great. But we need to understand here the differences. They can actually build. They can sandbox. They can create.
Mary: Yeah…
Vicki: There is a difference between experiencing something and creating something.
So, what’s your pep talk to teachers for utilizing this type of immersive technology?
Why should teachers try something like Open Sim?
Mary: I think we spend a lot of time saying that our equipment can’t handle it, or our tech department can’t handle it, or our filters won’t allow that to happen.
And I also say, “Be that rogue teacher.”
You know, be the lady in the corner of the building that has all the cats, because if you are that person, you take the lead.
Your tech department will find a way to make these things happen. And once it happens, the explosion in creativity is so worth it.
We spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over using technology as, “Oh, I have to INSERT that into my curriculum. Or I have to add that onto my curriculum.”
And it’s really a paradigm shift.
You have to realize that it IS the curriculum.
It is going to generate all of that critical thinking, and all of that inferring, and all of those (things like) “tolerating ambiguity” and all of those buzzwords that we have that we want our students to do.
This one element happens.
If you get out there and explore and make it happen, all of that other stuff that you’ve been worried about with your students?
It falls into place.
Vicki: That is great advice for us, remarkable teachers!
Now get out there it make it happen!
Mary: Yeah! (laughs)
  Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford: [email protected]
Bio as submitted
Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher in Western New York State and was a finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year for 2018. She considers herself a FEARLESS educator and an early adopter of many EdTech initiatives. Mary attempts to create a culture of inquiry in her classroom and hopes to build future innovators Her blog, http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com features many of her EdTech pursuits including an Augmented Reality Sandbox that she uses in her classroom, makerspaces, coding as well as the use of Virtual Reality/Virtual Environments in her classroom. Mary is also a specialist in engagement, and uses digital tools to engage students and ignite their learning. She has presented throughout New York State and numerous other conferences including MACUL (Michigan) and at ISTE Philadelphia, Denver and San Antonio.
Blog: http://www.yoursmarticles.blogspot.com
Twitter: @mrshoward118
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.
The post Bringing Literature to Life in Open Sim appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e293/
0 notes
adamgdooley · 7 years ago
Text
Rise of the Virtual Super-Teacher
How AI-powered personalization and immersive technologies are set to fundamentally transform the way we learn.
“It seems to me that it is through this machine that for the first time we will be able to have a one-to-one relationship between information source and information consumer.”
These are the eerily prophetic words of the late Science Fiction author and futurist visionary Isaac Asimov, long before Google became a verb.
“In the old days people would hire a tutor for their children and they’d adapt their teaching to the tastes and abilities of their students. But how many people could afford to hire a pedagogue? Most children went uneducated, and the only way to educate the masses was to have one teacher for a great many students, and to organize this they followed a curriculum. So we either had a one-to-one relationship for the few or a one-to-many relationship for the many, but now, there’s a possibility of a one-to-one relationship for the many. Everyone can have a teacher in the form of the gathered knowledge of the human species.”
Asimov’s tantalizing promise of scaling one-to-one instruction would, quite literally, give students the best of all worlds.
youtube
Now let’s take this one step further, and imagine teaching a class with hundreds of students, yet being able to pay perfect attention to each one, detecting the slightest hint of confusion and projecting the appropriate reaction accordingly. This would give teachers super-powers they could not dream of leveraging in normal classroom environment.
That scenario might actually be much closer than we might think, with the advent of immersive technologies that integrate with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since Virtual Reality (VR) relies on motion capture to work, it already has the inbuilt mechanisms capable of capturing and interpreting body language to create a “digital footprint” of each user.
The next step then is to use AI and machine learning to “teach” systems to filter, adapt and personalize interactions accordingly. It would be the ultimate fulfilment of Asimov’s vision, and something that leading academics in this space have long predicted.
“VR is the most psychologically powerful medium in history,” says Jeremy Bailenson, Communications Professor at Stanford University. In his recently published book Experience on Demand, Bailenson recounts how, although he’s been studying VR and its practical applications since the 1990’s, he is often taken aback by how much more impactful it is compared to other media, particularly where it is applied to learning, which led him to confidently assert that “almost any skill can be improved by virtual instruction.”
In his study of transformed social interaction Bailenson investigated how this could work in practice: “Unlike telephone conversations and video-conferences, interactants in virtual environments have the ability to systematically filter the physical appearance and behavioral actions of their avatars in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real time for strategic purposes. These transformations can have a drastic impact on interactants’ persuasive and instructional abilities.” In other words, the amount of engagement that a teacher’s avatar had with its virtual students had demonstrable impact on their engagement – and consequently in their learning.
The reason which makes VR such an effective and impactful learning tool is that it allows learners to achieve what is known as psychological presence. This essentially means that when we enter a virtual environment, we believe we are present, in spite of our conscious brains telling us that this is indeed a simulation. An important element in achieving such psychological presence is the concept of embodied cognition, which tells us that people absorb information better when performing actions themselves – rather than watching others do so or hearing/reading about them.
“Embodied cognition acknowledges that the mind and body are agents working together to make meaning of our experiences. It’s the idea that our mind alone does not dictate our worldview but instead that our cognition is shaped by the relationship between our mind and our body to inform and navigate our world, make meaning from our environments, and ultimately to result in learning,” explains educational and developmental psychologist Lindsay Portnoy.
Emerging research on VR indicate that the environment is a powerful tool from which we can create meaningful experiences that can effect great changes in our ability to perceive and understand the world around us. One study demonstrated that immersive VR provides better learning of physical movements than a two-dimensional video, and researchers from the University of Chicago found that simple gesturing in elementary students could potentially change and improve their knowledge. Current research by Disney, on the other hand, shows how VR is fast becoming seamless enough to enable it to replicate and synchronize with physical world behaviours such as catching a ball.
The advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technology will enable such datasets to be leveraged in a responsive and contextual way. This combination of AI and immersive capabilities means that future learning environments will become increasingly personalized, adapting to the individual needs of each user in real-time by analysing their “digital footprint” data.
“I’m reminded of an article I read about a father who felt “super human” while using his Amazon Echo. He and his kids loved interacting with the speaker and found the ability to call Ubers, order pizza and play music to be truly empowering and immersive – it really felt like they were interacting with an actual person,” says Ryan Andal, president and co-founder at Secret Location, who says he’s felt the same “super human” effect while using VR: “When I imagine how many jobs will be lost through automation and AI, I’m encouraged by how VR can combine with AR to allow us to be ‘super human’ and decrease knowledge gaps, learning curves and barriers for collaboration. VR will essentially allow declining markets to rejuvenate much faster than normal because of how powerful it can be as an educational and training tool.”
Andal believes that when VR becomes more accessible and affordable, distance learning could be the medium’s most important use case, opening the doors to spreading education – in its broadest possible sense – into areas typically shut out from it.
“We often think of education in the traditional sense – children in a classroom – but I believe VR is best used for training and learning new skills or trades. In that sense, VR is a complete overhaul of what’s possible! It eliminates the need for expensive materials to practice on and can put students in an array of situations that cannot normally be simulated for training purposes. VR means students will get that coveted “real-life work” experience sooner than usual.”
We are, in fact, already seeing such practical training applications emerging in a broad range of areas. The U.S. alpine team recently turned to VR to allow American racers to memorize the hill and take hundreds of virtual runs down a fast, tricky course in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics. They are the first known Olympic team in the world to utilize virtual reality in their training.
Troy Taylor, high performance director for U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, believes giving a racer the ability to experience the course in VR multiple times ahead of the games gives his team a crucial competitive advantage. STRIVR, the company which developed the simulation, has been working for many years with various sports outfits such as the NFL and NBA to improve athlete’s performance through virtual training. This has been so effective, in fact that some players reported having flashbacks to games they’d only experienced in VR.
Walmart is also leveraging this to train its employees following a successful pilot program last year. The company is also working with STRIVR to incorporate VR more widely in its training. The goal, STRIVR CEO Derek Belch told The Verge in a recent interview, is to put employees in scenarios that would be inconvenient to physically re-create — like dealing with spills, or preparing for a Black Friday shopping spree.
“We’re using computer vision to map scenes, so we literally know exactly where someone’s looking,” says Belch. “Wearers might look around an environment and find the spill, for example, then answer a multiple-choice question about what effect it could have on the store,” he explains.
The global EdTech is set to grow to an estimated $252 billion by 2020, and VR is expected to capture a large proportion of that booming market. The combination of ideological and commercial incentives will therefore likely lead to accelerated development of applications and capabilities that will empower teachers and learners like never before.
Where the Internet has made great strides towards democratizing knowledge, VR will democratize experiences. Immersive technologies represent a revolution in the way we transmit knowledge and will shape how we learn and conduct business more collaboratively in a globalized, boundaryless world.
The implications of this are profound according to Bailenson: “I firmly believe that for people who love to learn, the future is going to be filled with thrilling educational experiences,” he concludes.
For those interested in exploring the potential of Immersive Technologies in Learning, the Global Education and Skills Forum will be hosting an Immersive Learning Showcase and series of insightful discussions on the 17th and 18th March 2018. GESF 2018 is an initiative of the Varkey Foundation to improve standards of education for underprivileged children around the world.
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bisoroblog · 8 years ago
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Transforming Physicists, Engineers into Teachers at New MIT Program
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Doyung Lee is a living rebuke to the old maxim that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.
Lee, who is 24, has a bachelor’s degree in engineering that led him to become a programmer, a profession with high pay and good prospects. But he said he was “pretty miserable in that job. You don’t interact with people. You develop web apps you never see people use, and that weren’t meaningful to me.”
So he’s joined a pioneering program based at MIT to take people like him, with experience in high-demand fields such as engineering, physics, math, languages, biology and neuroscience, and transform them into teachers.
The idea upends the disparaging assessment, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that teachers are people who have no other useful skills. And by putting other talents first, it’s also a closely watched reversal of the conventional approach to training them.
“We don’t have to focus on math, because they’re already good at math,” said Yoon Jeon Kim, a research scientist in MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab who is monitoring the effort to see how well it works. “We don’t have to focus on science, because they’re already good at science. So we can concentrate on how to teach.”
This experiment, just getting under way, is called the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, named for the foundation that is underwriting it.
‘We don’t have to focus on math, because they’re already good at math. We don’t have to focus on science, because they’re already good at science. So we can concentrate on how to teach.’Yoon Jeon Kim, MIT Teaching Systems Lab
In the face of a nationwide teacher shortage, especially in science, technology, engineering and math, the academy is not the first program that has sought to attract experts in these areas to teaching, but it offers a significant departure from traditional teacher training programs in several other high-tech ways. In addition to the familiar student teaching routine, for instance, it uses virtual reality avatars to simulate classroom situations and crises.
One of the more radical departures is its rejection of a fixed course schedule, organized by credit hours or semesters; students advance as soon as they can demonstrate they’ve mastered the material. This gives them experience with a process, known as competency-based learning, that a growing number of primary and secondary schools where they’ll eventually teach are beginning to adopt. The International Association for K-12 Online Learning urged in December that competency-based learning be expanded.
And Lee and the other students in the inaugural class, which started in the fall, are not only learning how to become teachers; they’re also helping to design the program before more candidates show up, using input about successful training techniques from medical schools and even military academies and the U.S. Army War College.
“We’ve thrown out tradition and rebuilt this thing,” said Arthur Levine, the academy’s founding president and former head of one of the preeminent traditional schools of education, Columbia University’s Teachers College. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is housed at Teachers College and is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which are also among the academy’s funders.)
“We’re taking the innovations people have been talking about and actually trying them,” said Levine, who has authored 12 books, including a series of reports on teacher preparation. Everything that succeeds, he said, will be offered to other teacher training programs.
“A lot of people are watching this,” said Rodrick Lucero, vice president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “There is a lot of pressure on this program. We’ll see if it works in the small scale and then if it would work at a much bigger institution, where there are thousands of teacher candidates” and not just the 10 hand-picked “design fellows” enrolled so far. Their ranks will grow to 25 next fall.
With the cachet of MIT behind it, the project passed one major milestone unusually quickly, winning formal approval from the state of Massachusetts in the fall to award master’s degrees in education.
But there remain substantial hurdles, not the least of which is getting highly skilled professionals with in-demand degrees to go into a line of work that typically offers much less money and prestige.
“Why would people in these high-paying fields want to be teachers? The reality is a lot of them always wanted to be teachers, but people told them, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Our job is to find those people,” Levine said.
Programmers, for example, earn nearly 40 percent more than high school teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it isn’t only the salary that makes it tough to recruit prospective teachers: In recent years, a drumbeat of criticism from politicians and others has battered teacher morale and fueled turnover. Fewer than half of teachers said they were “very satisfied” with their jobs, a survey found, and 29 percent said they were likely to quit.
“Why should you become a teacher if you can code and make so much more?” said Yoon.
And yet, she said, people with backgrounds in technology are particularly suited to teaching, drawn as they are to problems and how to solve them.
Alexandra Trunnell, who at 20 has already earned degrees in physics and astronomy and is also enrolled at the academy, sees that firsthand, she said, in her student teaching.
“When students ask me about things like black holes or distance over time, I can take what I’ve learned and bring it back to the classroom,” she said.
What these first students in the new academy share in common, Yoon said, is that “they want to change the world through education. And they think this is how they can do it. This is a perfect fit for them. It doesn’t mean that teaching will be any easier for them than it is for other teachers.”
The academy used social media to recruit its first class. It asked the presidents of top colleges and universities for nominees. It advertised on the Boston public transit system.
In addition to free tuition and a $20,000-a-year stipend, what it offered its prospective students was “the chance to invent the future,” Levine said. “This is the kind of place that when you see the job description you either say, ‘That’s crazy’ or, ‘That’s the perfect thing for me.’ ”
Breauna Campbell, 25, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering with a concentration in chemical engineering, left a job testing pharmaceutical equipment to sign on.
“I felt like I wasn’t using all the educational opportunities I’d been given, to help the next generation,” said Campbell, who is from Indiana. “I’m not normally a risk-taker, so this is way out of my element. But the goals were in line with my thinking, realizing that how we’re educating students isn’t working.”
It’s the idea of inventing the future, Levine said, that conventional schools of education have been slow to envision or embrace. So the academy teamed up with MIT, which doesn’t have a school of education.
“We didn’t want to change an education school,” Levine said. “We wanted to invent one. It’s just very hard to move these things into established organizations. We needed to create the model, which is what we hope we’re doing here.”
What MIT gets out of this is the chance to try out theories developed in its Teaching Systems Lab and other departments that study teaching and learning and ways they can benefit from new technologies.
“There are so many thinkers and engineers and scientists here who are interested in education in general and really want to impact K-12 education,” Yoon said. “We have all these interesting ideas that have already been incubated within MIT that we want to test.”
In its small space on the first floor of a renovated old brick office building a few blocks from the MIT campus, the academy so far consists primarily of an open common area the size of a classroom where students sit at high counters and work on laptops and tablets.
Classes are provided both online and in person, supervised by a small faculty the academy calls “mentors.” Students are assessed through both conventional means and in new ways developed by these faculty and by scientists at MIT — in those virtual simulations, for example, and on video game-type tests.
All of these approaches are still being fine-tuned by the members of the inaugural class, who hang out in the common area when they’re not student teaching at a partner public school. On a whiteboard, color-coded sticky notes propose to answer the question: “What is an ideal teacher?” The answers include, “Passion for teaching,” “Efficient at explaining things,” “Efficient with time.”
Time is one of the things this program considers radically differently. Rather than requiring that students sit through a comprehensive list of required courses of a given length in a particular order, it lets them move on once they’ve demonstrated that they know a subject.
“If on Day One you’ve shown us you have all those competencies in the first 12 minutes, then just solve the problems and move on,” Levine said.
“We’re throwing out the clock, we’re throwing out credit hours, we’re throwing out seat time,” he said, listing the customary measures used in higher education. “All we care about is outcomes: What do you know?”
Ultimately, the academy leaders stress, candidates will be judged the old-fashioned way: by being made to prove, in a real-world classroom, that they’ve learned their stuff. Student teaching remains a central part of the curriculum.
But students also interact with those virtual reality avatars, which simulate difficult situations they may not encounter in their training, such as belligerent parents or young people who suffer crises of confidence.
“You might be in a school for an entire year and never see a student have a meltdown. We’ll make sure you do,” Levine said.
Voiced by actors, the avatars may appear cartoonish, but the simulations are detailed down to the background noise of people passing in the corridor. After a while, Campbell said, “You’re really in it.”
The biggest innovation of the program, however, is giving credit to these prospective teachers for their pre-existing knowledge and skills — especially in math and science disciplines that are so much in demand — Lucero said.
“It seems to make sense that competency-based education is a good fit for people who have been professionals in their field,” he said.
Still, Lucero said, there may be risks in separately considering all of the expertise required in a classroom, rather than combining the various parts into a collective whole.
“It’s not about just being good at one skill but being good at all the skills you need when you walk in the door,” he said. “The danger is this may be a very simplistic way at looking at a complicated thing, and that is pedagogy. Whatever we do, we want to make sure we’re doing it in front of real kids in a real school in front of a master teacher.”
If the ideas do work, said Levine, he hopes that other schools of education will adopt them.
“We don’t want this to be regarded as another competitor. We want it to be considered as a resource,” he said. “They don’t have to take the whole thing. They can adapt the challenges. They can adapt the simulations.”
What Lee has learned so far, in his student teaching, is “how not much has changed since I went to high school,” in spite of hurtling advances in technology. When he first went into a school as a student teacher, “I was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
The academy, he said, can change things much more quickly than conventional schools of education.
“We’re preparing teachers to help build what schools can actually become,” Lee said.
Trunnell thinks so too.
“We can fix a lot of other problems in education,” she said, “if we treat teachers as the superstars that they are. Because they are.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our newsletter.
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perfectzablog · 8 years ago
Text
Transforming Physicists, Engineers into Teachers at New MIT Program
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Doyung Lee is a living rebuke to the old maxim that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.
Lee, who is 24, has a bachelor’s degree in engineering that led him to become a programmer, a profession with high pay and good prospects. But he said he was “pretty miserable in that job. You don’t interact with people. You develop web apps you never see people use, and that weren’t meaningful to me.”
So he’s joined a pioneering program based at MIT to take people like him, with experience in high-demand fields such as engineering, physics, math, languages, biology and neuroscience, and transform them into teachers.
The idea upends the disparaging assessment, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that teachers are people who have no other useful skills. And by putting other talents first, it’s also a closely watched reversal of the conventional approach to training them.
“We don’t have to focus on math, because they’re already good at math,” said Yoon Jeon Kim, a research scientist in MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab who is monitoring the effort to see how well it works. “We don’t have to focus on science, because they’re already good at science. So we can concentrate on how to teach.”
This experiment, just getting under way, is called the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, named for the foundation that is underwriting it.
‘We don’t have to focus on math, because they’re already good at math. We don’t have to focus on science, because they’re already good at science. So we can concentrate on how to teach.’Yoon Jeon Kim, MIT Teaching Systems Lab
In the face of a nationwide teacher shortage, especially in science, technology, engineering and math, the academy is not the first program that has sought to attract experts in these areas to teaching, but it offers a significant departure from traditional teacher training programs in several other high-tech ways. In addition to the familiar student teaching routine, for instance, it uses virtual reality avatars to simulate classroom situations and crises.
One of the more radical departures is its rejection of a fixed course schedule, organized by credit hours or semesters; students advance as soon as they can demonstrate they’ve mastered the material. This gives them experience with a process, known as competency-based learning, that a growing number of primary and secondary schools where they’ll eventually teach are beginning to adopt. The International Association for K-12 Online Learning urged in December that competency-based learning be expanded.
And Lee and the other students in the inaugural class, which started in the fall, are not only learning how to become teachers; they’re also helping to design the program before more candidates show up, using input about successful training techniques from medical schools and even military academies and the U.S. Army War College.
“We’ve thrown out tradition and rebuilt this thing,” said Arthur Levine, the academy’s founding president and former head of one of the preeminent traditional schools of education, Columbia University’s Teachers College. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is housed at Teachers College and is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which are also among the academy’s funders.)
“We’re taking the innovations people have been talking about and actually trying them,” said Levine, who has authored 12 books, including a series of reports on teacher preparation. Everything that succeeds, he said, will be offered to other teacher training programs.
“A lot of people are watching this,” said Rodrick Lucero, vice president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “There is a lot of pressure on this program. We’ll see if it works in the small scale and then if it would work at a much bigger institution, where there are thousands of teacher candidates” and not just the 10 hand-picked “design fellows” enrolled so far. Their ranks will grow to 25 next fall.
With the cachet of MIT behind it, the project passed one major milestone unusually quickly, winning formal approval from the state of Massachusetts in the fall to award master’s degrees in education.
But there remain substantial hurdles, not the least of which is getting highly skilled professionals with in-demand degrees to go into a line of work that typically offers much less money and prestige.
“Why would people in these high-paying fields want to be teachers? The reality is a lot of them always wanted to be teachers, but people told them, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Our job is to find those people,” Levine said.
Programmers, for example, earn nearly 40 percent more than high school teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it isn’t only the salary that makes it tough to recruit prospective teachers: In recent years, a drumbeat of criticism from politicians and others has battered teacher morale and fueled turnover. Fewer than half of teachers said they were “very satisfied” with their jobs, a survey found, and 29 percent said they were likely to quit.
“Why should you become a teacher if you can code and make so much more?” said Yoon.
And yet, she said, people with backgrounds in technology are particularly suited to teaching, drawn as they are to problems and how to solve them.
Alexandra Trunnell, who at 20 has already earned degrees in physics and astronomy and is also enrolled at the academy, sees that firsthand, she said, in her student teaching.
“When students ask me about things like black holes or distance over time, I can take what I’ve learned and bring it back to the classroom,” she said.
What these first students in the new academy share in common, Yoon said, is that “they want to change the world through education. And they think this is how they can do it. This is a perfect fit for them. It doesn’t mean that teaching will be any easier for them than it is for other teachers.”
The academy used social media to recruit its first class. It asked the presidents of top colleges and universities for nominees. It advertised on the Boston public transit system.
In addition to free tuition and a $20,000-a-year stipend, what it offered its prospective students was “the chance to invent the future,” Levine said. “This is the kind of place that when you see the job description you either say, ‘That’s crazy’ or, ‘That’s the perfect thing for me.’ ”
Breauna Campbell, 25, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering with a concentration in chemical engineering, left a job testing pharmaceutical equipment to sign on.
“I felt like I wasn’t using all the educational opportunities I’d been given, to help the next generation,” said Campbell, who is from Indiana. “I’m not normally a risk-taker, so this is way out of my element. But the goals were in line with my thinking, realizing that how we’re educating students isn’t working.”
It’s the idea of inventing the future, Levine said, that conventional schools of education have been slow to envision or embrace. So the academy teamed up with MIT, which doesn’t have a school of education.
“We didn’t want to change an education school,” Levine said. “We wanted to invent one. It’s just very hard to move these things into established organizations. We needed to create the model, which is what we hope we’re doing here.”
What MIT gets out of this is the chance to try out theories developed in its Teaching Systems Lab and other departments that study teaching and learning and ways they can benefit from new technologies.
“There are so many thinkers and engineers and scientists here who are interested in education in general and really want to impact K-12 education,” Yoon said. “We have all these interesting ideas that have already been incubated within MIT that we want to test.”
In its small space on the first floor of a renovated old brick office building a few blocks from the MIT campus, the academy so far consists primarily of an open common area the size of a classroom where students sit at high counters and work on laptops and tablets.
Classes are provided both online and in person, supervised by a small faculty the academy calls “mentors.” Students are assessed through both conventional means and in new ways developed by these faculty and by scientists at MIT — in those virtual simulations, for example, and on video game-type tests.
All of these approaches are still being fine-tuned by the members of the inaugural class, who hang out in the common area when they’re not student teaching at a partner public school. On a whiteboard, color-coded sticky notes propose to answer the question: “What is an ideal teacher?” The answers include, “Passion for teaching,” “Efficient at explaining things,” “Efficient with time.”
Time is one of the things this program considers radically differently. Rather than requiring that students sit through a comprehensive list of required courses of a given length in a particular order, it lets them move on once they’ve demonstrated that they know a subject.
“If on Day One you’ve shown us you have all those competencies in the first 12 minutes, then just solve the problems and move on,” Levine said.
“We’re throwing out the clock, we’re throwing out credit hours, we’re throwing out seat time,” he said, listing the customary measures used in higher education. “All we care about is outcomes: What do you know?”
Ultimately, the academy leaders stress, candidates will be judged the old-fashioned way: by being made to prove, in a real-world classroom, that they’ve learned their stuff. Student teaching remains a central part of the curriculum.
But students also interact with those virtual reality avatars, which simulate difficult situations they may not encounter in their training, such as belligerent parents or young people who suffer crises of confidence.
“You might be in a school for an entire year and never see a student have a meltdown. We’ll make sure you do,” Levine said.
Voiced by actors, the avatars may appear cartoonish, but the simulations are detailed down to the background noise of people passing in the corridor. After a while, Campbell said, “You’re really in it.”
The biggest innovation of the program, however, is giving credit to these prospective teachers for their pre-existing knowledge and skills — especially in math and science disciplines that are so much in demand — Lucero said.
“It seems to make sense that competency-based education is a good fit for people who have been professionals in their field,” he said.
Still, Lucero said, there may be risks in separately considering all of the expertise required in a classroom, rather than combining the various parts into a collective whole.
“It’s not about just being good at one skill but being good at all the skills you need when you walk in the door,” he said. “The danger is this may be a very simplistic way at looking at a complicated thing, and that is pedagogy. Whatever we do, we want to make sure we’re doing it in front of real kids in a real school in front of a master teacher.”
If the ideas do work, said Levine, he hopes that other schools of education will adopt them.
“We don’t want this to be regarded as another competitor. We want it to be considered as a resource,” he said. “They don’t have to take the whole thing. They can adapt the challenges. They can adapt the simulations.”
What Lee has learned so far, in his student teaching, is “how not much has changed since I went to high school,” in spite of hurtling advances in technology. When he first went into a school as a student teacher, “I was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
The academy, he said, can change things much more quickly than conventional schools of education.
“We’re preparing teachers to help build what schools can actually become,” Lee said.
Trunnell thinks so too.
“We can fix a lot of other problems in education,” she said, “if we treat teachers as the superstars that they are. Because they are.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our newsletter.
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hottytoddynews · 8 years ago
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This story was reprinted with permission of the Ole Miss Alumni Review. Summer 2014 Edition
Digital avatars allow Ole Miss students to gain hands-on teaching experience. 
While there is no substitute for firsthand field experience in teacher training, aspiring educators at the University of Mississippi now have the chance to learn by doing even before student teaching, thanks to the latest technology in teacher preparation. In two years, almost 1,000 UM students have gained hands-on experience by teaching five avatars — all with unique personalities — in a virtual classroom.
Since 2012, the Ole Miss School of Education has been one of a growing number of institutions around the country — and the only university in Mississippi — using TeachLivE, a classroom-simulation program designed by education and computer science faculty at the University of Central Florida (UCF). At least 40 universities are now participating in this venture funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  
TeachLivE provides a virtual classroom experience very similar to real-life instruction but without the risk of disrupting class for real students. While not a replacement for traditional student teaching, the technology allows UM education majors to get a taste of leading their own classroom earlier in their training and fine-tune aspects of their craft. One goal is that this digital teaching experience will allow UM teacher candidates to begin student teaching ahead of the curve.
“The virtual experience of TeachLivE is the closest you can get to teaching without placing real students at risk,” says School of Education Dean David Rock, who coordinated the university’s involvement in the program.
“As an educator, you’re going to make mistakes when you first start. This gives our students the chance to make some of those mistakes on the virtual students first and be better prepared to teach once they begin their field experiences.”
In the last year, the School of Education has expanded its facilities to include virtual classrooms not only in Oxford but at the university’s DeSoto and Tupelo campuses as well.
“The program is especially beneficial to nontraditional students who may not have been in a public school classroom setting for many years,” says Mark Ortwein, assistant professor of teacher education who teaches at the Tupelo and DeSoto campuses. “This offers a window into contemporary classrooms, which can be quite different than they were a decade ago.” Currently, every junior education major completes at least two supervised TeachLivE sessions during the academic year, a number that is likely to rise in the future as more courses utilize these digital classrooms as part of the curriculum.
“We’re very fortunate to have TeachLivE as a teaching–learning resource for pre-service teachers,” says Susan McClelland (MEd 88, Ph.D. 96), chair of teacher education. “Our faculty [members] have found its use to be beneficial to the overall learning experience of their students, and our students value the learning opportunity and the feedback. We believe these experiences make our students better prepared to work with children in a P-12 environment. This technology has the potential to elevate teacher education at Ole Miss to a new level.”
Avatars That Learn
Each of UM’s virtual classrooms features an 80-inch monitor, floor-mounted motion sensors and a headset for the student teacher. Once logged in and linked to the UCF facility, pre-service teachers can teach five middle school-aged avatars — named CJ, Ed, Kevin, Maria and Sean — each with his or her own personalities, interests, motives and sense of humor. The floor sensors allow students to navigate the virtual classroom and actually walk up and even kneel down next to the avatars’ desks.
Almost 1,000 UM students have gained hands-on experience by teaching five avatars named CJ, Ed, Kevin, Maria and Sean.
Using a “hybrid intelligence model,” operators at UCF use software and prerecorded behaviors to bring these digital students to life remotely from their facility in Orlando during sessions.
Based on certain variables set by Ole Miss instructors and the UCF operators, the digital students can present myriad classroom situations. If a student teacher is organized and adept in his or her subject, the avatars can learn.
If an education major is unprepared or lacks management skills, the avatars can lose interest, text in class, try to flirt with the teacher, fall asleep or even derail the lesson by challenging the teacher’s authority.
“It feels like real life because you never know what the avatars are going to do,” says Shannon Green (BAEd 14), who will begin her first year of teaching this fall at Luther Branson Elementary in Madison. “I appreciated how I was able to critique myself. I’ve improved little things like remembering how to slow down and explain lessons in a way that students will understand. CJ was the most difficult avatar. She always seemed to crave attention and not necessarily positive attention. I saw the same sort of behavior during my student teaching.”
The personalities of the avatars have unexpectedly influenced the culture within the School of Education. Students and faculty joke about CJ’s attitude or Sean’s over participation in class. During graduation on May 10, graduates laughed when Dean Rock informed the new teachers that CJ wanted them all to know she said “Congratulations” before the big event.
“I feel the program helped me gain confidence more than anything,” says secondary education graduate Devin Hughes (BAEd 14), who will begin teaching at Strayhorn High School in DeSoto County next fall. “I would advise that anyone with no prior teaching experience use this before teaching a real class. Te avatars are all equally difficult to teach because they all have such distinct personality types, which the professors did a great [job] of teaching us how to work with them.”
Within the avatars’ personalities are also telltale signs of important issues the future teachers will face once they enter a real classroom. Avatars can display signs of some learning disabilities, mood swings or struggles in their personal lives such as abuse or neglect at home.
“The program gives our students a chance to understand what it will be like standing and speaking in front of real people for the first time,” says Larry Christman (BSHPE 72, MEd 75), adjunct instructor in teacher education and a veteran school administrator who has come out of retirement to help implement TeachLivE at Ole Miss. “There are five distinct personalities on the screen, and these students are going to see these same types of personalities when they are in the real world. I think it will be very valuable to our programs.”
Following each 30-minute session, faculty members critique the students’ lessons, leadership style and provide feedback about how to better prepare for upcoming field experiences. Usually completed in groups of three or four, pre-service teachers also critique each other following lessons.
“It was a really safe environment where you can gain a lot of experience,” says Andy Banahan (BALM 01, BAEd 14), who is beginning a new career teaching in Killeen, Texas, next fall. “I will probably never have a class with just five kids like these, but I’m sure I will have many classes with personalities similar to them. Future CJs will try and trick you into a back-and-forth power struggle. Future Kevins will try to be ladies’ men and flirt with the female teachers. It was a valuable experience and really fun too.”
Set for Growth
With UM’s second-year expansion of TeachLivE at its regional campuses in Tupelo and DeSoto County completed, the School of Education has plans to further weave the technology into its curricula in the next academic year and beyond. Currently, two introductory education courses use the program. In the fall, faculty members will use some of the latest updates in the TeachLivE program to help student teachers gain experience with students who do not speak English as their primary language, according to McClelland.
Professional development could also be a groundbreaking direction for using TeachLivE, according to Carrie Straub, director of research for TeachLivE at UCF. Straub says UCF research shows that through practice with the program, working teachers are able to significantly improve their teaching methods in as little as four sessions. To make the technology more accessible, they’ve also created a mobile version of TeachLivE that can be powered by a Wi-Fi hotspot from a smart phone and only requires a laptop with webcam, headset and an Xbox Kinect motion-sensor device. The virtual classroom can even be displayed on many smart boards commonly used in classrooms. 
“This really presents a new paradigm in the way teachers can do professional development,” says Straub. “Their improvements can be extended directly to their classrooms. We’ve also found that teachers are energized by using this technology and actually enjoy their time with the avatars. Our vision is that eventually, every single classroom should have its own TeachLivE.”
Ole Miss is one of 10 research sites providing data for the TeachLivE research project. In 2012, mathematics education professor Renee’ Hill-Cunningham compiled data for researchers at UCF by bringing four seventh-grade teachers from Lee County into UM’s TeachLivE classroom in Oxford.
She found that after four 10-minute sessions followed by questioners, the teachers improved their efficiency in how they taught the lessons. Over time, they covered more material and spent less time talking at the avatars and more time asking higher order thinking questions. These results were very similar to those recorded at other research sites. “The pace of how the teachers went through questions became more brisk and vetted,” explains Hill-Cunningham. “It rose to an almost electric level. By the end, you could see how they were asking deeper questions and drawing more insight from the avatars than in the beginning.”
Other goals for the program, Straub says, include creating new software for working and aspiring teachers specializing in critical-needs subjects. TeachLivE is developing new avatars with learning disabilities for training in special education, as well as in lower elementary classrooms. All studies completed by the research team at UCF use lessons and coursework aligned with Common Core State Standards.
In addition, the five avatars are growing up! For the past two years, CJ, Kevin, Ed, Maria and Sean have been middle school-aged children. The program now offers a high school-aged version of the same avatar children to allow more specialized use for secondary education training. An adult avatar is also available, which can be used to simulate parent-teacher conferences and more.
“TeachLivE is a learning opportunity that pushes our pre-service teachers to be better every time they use it,” Rock says. “I hope we continue to find ways to prepare every future teacher for any classroom situation. If you come to Ole Miss to become a teacher, we want you to know that we’re going to bring you every tool we can to help make you a quality teacher.” 
By Andrew Abernathy 
This story was reprinted with permission from the Ole Miss Alumni Review. The Alumni Review is published quarterly for members of the Ole Miss Alumni Association. Join or renew your membership with the Alumni Association today, and don’t miss a single issue.
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