“TeachME” Project at University of Central Florida

creative, original
adoptable, replicable
promises impact, influence
inspires, motivates change
paradigm shifting, game changing

Why is it innovative?
A virtual classroom aimed to eliminate the trial-by-fire approach to classroom-management training by better preparing novice teachers prior to their deployment in actual classrooms.

More Information

From USA Today, Student avatars could help improve teacher training, July 7, 2010:

Here's how it works: The teacher-in-training stands in a room in front of a projection screen depicting five students into two rows. The student avatars are being controlled by "interactors" — acting students from the university's fine arts school and sometimes hired professionals — who have studied the behavior of the students they are embodying.

The fact that the teachers-in-training are interacting with avatars that are being controlled in real time by humans, as opposed to artificially intelligent personas, is the key to the whole project, says [Lisa] Dieker [Coordinator of the special education program at Central Florida's college of education].

"The first scenario they built, they said 'Lisa, come in here, stand on this spot, and say this,' “she recalls. "And I said, 'Well, that's not teaching — I should be able to walk in and say whatever I want.' And they said 'You're crazy! We don't have simulators that do that!' "

The presence of human interactors eliminates the parameters that would make an artificially intelligent simulation a poor training tool for actual classroom teaching, Dieker says. "Teaching," she observes, "is not a scripted activity."

The interactors doing the live sessions are across campus in the university's Media Convergence Lab, where they can see and hear the teacher-in-training via Skype. A second puppeteer, Angel Lopez, a teacher educator at the graduate school, controls a series of knobs that can prompt non-speaking outbursts, such as giggling…