On Tuesday October 12, South’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) Department held an open house, with speakers from Boston College and the University of Essex, to unveil its crowning achievement in a ten virtual education.

South is home to a Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment (MiRTLE) virtual classroom. This online classroom allows users to log in and enter a online classroom where they can navigate an avatar and listen to, watch, and interact with a class in real-time. South’s MiRTLE classroom is located in Susan Wolfe’s classroom, room 210. It is the first mixed reality teaching system in any K-12 school.

User’s avatars stand in a large lecture hall-style classroom, facing two screens at the front of the room. One screen is a video feed of the room so that they can watch and listen to the class as it is being taught. The user controlling the avatar can also speak through the MiRTLE system and their voice can be heard loud and clear in the real life classroom. The second screen displays whatever the teacher is currently showing on the classroom projector.

The open house included short speeches from Wendie Palazzo, director of Career and Technical Education for the district, Aaron Walsh of Boston College, director of the grid institute, and MiRTLE inventor Michael Gardner of the University of Essex. Gardner and Walsh both addressed the open house via the MiRTLE system, from Essex and Boston respectively.

“It should be business as usual, a teacher should be able to do their presentation just as they would in a real classroom”, said Gardner.

Following a presentation about MiRTLE, attendees moved around other CTE classrooms where they could view other new technology here at South including a Plasma Cutter and a Haas Lathe in Jesse Sirouvy’s room.

“I believe that this is a revolution in K-12 education” said Walsh.