During October, we have had several Graduate School of Education pre-service teachers teaching to a virtual class of five avatar students as part of our pilot research.

We have moved on from the original avatars which were a little dated and were somewhat jerky when they moved.

We have been lucky enough to work with the most recent version of TeachLivE where the avatars are much more life-like and have a more up-to-date classroom environment. These new avatars even have iPads. We are also lucky to have the new Australian interactors working behind the scenes, and this makes it much more relevant to the Australian context.

Our pre-service teaches report that it only takes a very short time before they forget it is a virtual class and starting relating to the avatars as real students.

In the image below, the avatars are learning about 3-D shapes with one of our first-year pre-service teachers. For this particular teacher, this was the first time she had conducted a lesson and she reported that it was an excellent way to gain experience and build her repertoire of teaching skills before she had to manage a class of real children.