Development of a Virtual Classroom for High School Teacher Training

In order to deal with the diversity of problems, teacher trainees need not only knowledge but also repeated practice to accumulate experience. In Japan, however, the training of teachers mainly relies on in-classroom lectures in universities. It is compensated with the practice for a relatively short period, say only two to three weeks in real schools. Even though there may be some chances for practicing teaching skills in the teachertraining course provided by universities, these practices are usually conducted by peer role-playings in small number of participants. This is far from real situations where they have to face dozens of teenagers. The teacher-training courses in Japan obviously lacks the practice in teaching skill and the admission of classes. The result is, many young teachers left their jobs in the first year due to frustration and other mental issues. Therefore, we started a project of building a virtual classroom as a training system for the candidates of high school teachers. Virtual environments have also been shown to be an effective tool for various training tasks. Jones et al. [3] developed a job interview simulation platform, which supports social training and coaching in the context of job interviews. Williamon et al. [4] designed and tested the efficacy of simulated performance environments as a new training facility for musician trainees. On the other hand, few studies have focused on the training system of teachers in virtual environment. TechLive [1] is one of the examples. This application is also a VR simulated classroom with operator(s). In this system, one operator can only control one of the virtual students by selecting pre-defined animation sequences or driving it with a motion capture device in real-time.