Abstract:

Immersive technologies are involving all areas of our lives and there is a noticeable advance from wider use in industry to the field of social sciences. The immersive environment of virtual reality allows the user to enter different situations and train communication, alertness and resistance to stress. We try to use this benefit while preparing future teachers, for whom we have been creating a virtual classroom model which help them to practice their pedagogical and psychological skills.

In the virtual classroom students works with a head-mounted display that transports him to a virtual space modeled after a specific elementary school classroom. They see virtual students - avatars - controlled by a teacher-didactic who leads the training of future teachers. Student is placed in a selected partial teaching situation - he has the task of explaining something to the pupils, assigning a task, solving a specific problem, etc. In the classroom, the future teacher has the teacher has a whiteboard with markers and the possibility to play an electronic presentation. The entire training is based on a lesson in a virtual classroom, which is significantly supplemented by self-reflection, mutual evaluation of future teachers and feedback from the teacher-didactic.

This article is mainly focused on the description and development of the virtual classroom model that we currently use and which we are gradually creating as part of research by development. We continuously test and evaluate the gradual modifications of the virtual classroom environment so that the future teacher's feeling in the virtual classroom is more and more similar to the feeling in a regular real classroom. Future teachers who work with the latest version of the virtual classroom report a high degree of immersion – the stress they feel when entering a virtual classroom is very close to the stress they experience in practice in schools. Compared to the initial models, in which disturbing elements related to the imperfection of the model occasionally appeared, virtual classroom testers now rather point to the positives of working in a virtual classroom, express surprise at the degree of immersion and appreciate the opportunity to participate in training of pedagogical-psychological skills in this environment.

Keywords:

Immersive environment, teacher preparations, virtual reality.