Many future teachers complain that they do not get enough hands-on or real classroom experience. They often claim that professors cannot prepare students for true classroom experiences. Future teachers are seldom faced with student conflicts and issues that may arise while teaching a class.
However, the University of Central Florida’s College of Education is now trying to change the amount of real classroom experience that future teachers receive. The university has created a virtual classroom that allows soon to be teachers the opportunity to get a feel of a real classroom without having to experiment with real students.
The program is designed on a screen. On the screen are the full body images of five students. The teacher stands and teaches in front of the screen just as he or she would stand in front of a classroom. The virtual students have individual personalities and actions of that of real children. The students talk out, make noises, throw paper wads, and talk back.
If the virtual actions of the students are not bad enough, the program is designed so that a person in a nearby room can wear electronic sensors and carry out actions for any of the virtual students. Therefore, specific actions can be sued to test the teacher.
Prospective teachers who have gone through the program state that although the situation only consists of five students it feels like a class of 20 students.
The designers of the program think that it is more effective than using real students in a real classroom because more types of conflicts and situations can be carried out to test the teacher in a quicker amount of time. The professors can more easily control which types of tests they want to place upon the teacher. The students are also there for the duration. The teacher must respond and fix the problem. There is no sending students to a principal or out of the room with the virtual program.