A couple of years ago, I volunteered with a community of early childhood special education teachers in a small, rural Wisconsin town. Every day, we shared a meal together. We laughed, we cried, we shared our stories. These teachers had very different lives, and the meals they enjoyed were reflective of those different paths.
The first time we visited the school was in a new kindergarten classroom in the middle of the school’s school year. The class was divided into four sections, and we were told we should have four classes. The teachers were all very surprised when we replied, “I think I’ll go on.” We were surprised and confused, as the class was divided into three classes, and we were told we should all go on.
As the teachers were trying to figure out the way things were supposed to go, they realized that we had four different classes, and it was a lot of work just to teach the same thing over and over again. What we really needed was some online learning. So we set up a class on the World Wide Web and taught our classmates in our own time. And we got paid to do it.
The online classes you take in school are a great way to learn things you probably wouldn’t do otherwise. If it’s for fun, you’d probably do it without thinking twice. If it’s for learning, you probably think twice about it. But online classes are different because you can do them at your own pace, or at your own pace and time. Because they’re in your own home you can attend them at your own convenience.
We just finished putting together the first of 3 videos that will teach a class on the World Wide Web. This is one of our best online classes because we can do it at our own pace and time. Even if it is a 4-hour class, we only have to do it once, and in a different location, so it can be fun and learning at the same time.
One of the videos is a special class on the web for kids who have special needs, or are on the autism spectrum. To give you an idea of what we’ve learned and done, we’ve been using our own children as guinea pigs to see how our online classes can work for people with special needs. To see if we can use the same technology to teach a class for people with autism or a learning disability.
The idea is that, for example, for autistic kids we could teach them to control a robot with just a keyboard and a mouse, and for people with learning disabilities they could learn to control a virtual reality with just a headset and a TV. Of course, these virtual reality courses would only work with video games and not other media. We’d also like to see the use of VR in classrooms in schools, not just for children with special needs, but for anyone who might benefit from it.
We don’t actually have any plans to make these courses online. But we are working with a couple of educational companies to create a kind of online “virtual classroom” for kids with learning disabilities. They would be in the form of a video game designed to work with an iPad or iPhone, and they would allow the kids to play as a character they control in the game.
But we don’t know how to create a virtual classroom for kids with special needs. I do know that they don’t want us to. And we would be more comfortable in terms of how we want to teach them. So we’ve tried to make it in the form of a screen that you can use to play a game, or a game that you’re playing with a virtual person that you can watch.
We’re not sure if we actually want to make a video game for children with special needs. A few years ago we sent out an e-mail to our users asking them if they were interested in making a video game that would teach them things about life and the universe. But we didn’t get any responses – not that there were many responses – so I’m not sure if we should be making a video game.