As a professor of education, UM-Dearborn’s David Hill makes a practice of keeping up on the latest educational technologies. As a former special education teacher, he’s also highly aware that students with disabilities are often overlooked in how tech is deployed in classrooms. He seems to always be working hard to reverse that trend.
Through an MCubed project with Professor of Educational Technology Stein Brunvand, the team is exploring the potential of virtual reality for students with disabilities.
Their latest effort involves using virtual reality to get students outside the classroom and into the community, where they can practice life skills like shopping or riding public transit. Traditional community-based experiences can be labor intensive and costly. The team is exploring VR experiences as a useful, less-expensive alternative that could also be repeated multiple times with no additional cost.
