College of Education’s virtual classroom featured in MPBN report
The Maine Public Broadcasting Network reported on a new lab in University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development that enables students to teach in front of a virtual classroom of avatars in preparation of their student teaching in Maine schools. The new lab in Shibles Hall uses the program TeachLivE, a mixed-reality teaching environment that supports teacher practice in classroom management, methods and content. More than 70 colleges and universities, including UMaine, are now using TeachLivE to help train their teacher candidates, according to the report. “We have, literally, hundreds of them,” said Susan Gardner, interim dean of the college, who added it can be tough to find opportunities for all of the students to train in schools at the same time. “So this is an opportunity, before they even go out into the field, to try on some of the different theories, some of the practices we’ve talked about,” she said.