Education Week - August 27, 2014 - 11

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LEFT: Another student,
Aaron Gonsalves, 16,
also experiences the
virtual game, which
takes users through
five different
environments
via portals.
Counseling Is New Priority
For Policing Policy in L.A.
| DISTRICT DOSSIER | The police force for the nation's
second-largest school system will now send most
students who get into trouble for fighting, bringing
tobacco or alcohol to campus, and other minor
offenses to counseling rather than issuing citations
or arresting them.
calming effect on his students of
structured sessions with meditative
or relaxation-oriented virtual-reality
apps, such as Titans of Space,
a short guided tour of planets and
stars.
"[The Oculus Rift] needs to be
properly and ethically researched,"
he said, "but I think it's going to be
huge."
Mr. Jacobson of PublicVR agreed,
predicting that affordable virtualreality
headsets will quickly find a
niche because "there will be a few
things they do better than everything
else."
For example, a substantial body
of research from industry and the
military shows that immersive virtual-reality
experiences can serve
as effective training tools to help
people learn to perform new tasks,
Mr. Jacobson said.
And research that PublicVR and
others have conducted suggests
that immersive virtual-reality
technologies help students learn
by giving them an "inside view" of
a structure or an environment-an
Egyptian temple, for instance, or
Puget Sound-that they might otherwise
observe only externally.
"When students can see the entire
interior of a space, they understand
how it fits together and what
it means and how it works much
more readily," Mr. Jacobson said. "If
it's a forest, they're there. If it's a jet
engine, they have their hands in it."
Facing Barriers
But whatever the promise of a
new product, any company still
must find a way to overcome the
well-established barriers to newtechnology
adoption that characterize
K-12 schools, said Mr. Urdan,
the market analyst.
"Facebook has more money than
God, so if they want to come in and
disrupt education funding protocols
by pumping their own money into
schools, more power to them," he
said. "But I haven't seen evidence
that they're willing to go that far."
Mr. Urdan chalked up talk of a potential
education focus for Oculus,
and the possibility of free devices
being given to schools, as a public
relations strategy.
"If you take these things and stick
them in an all-Hispanic classroom
in East Palo Alto, you'll get all kinds
of heartwarming news coverage of
kids with helmets on their heads
checking out ancient Pompeii," he
said. "Good for them, but that's not
a business model."
Perhaps the most promising educational
use of the new virtual-reality
devices parallels their primary
commercial use: digital games.
Mr. Marunczyn, for example, said
he briefly began experimenting with
allowing his students to construct
their own virtual worlds using the
popular online game Minecraft,
"
Visually, it's stunning.
It just provokes and
promotes a very
imaginative response
[from students], and
ultimately that's what
I want to see."
MATHIEU MARUNCZYN
Special Education Teacher
then explore those worlds in virtual
reality using the Oculus Rift-
a pedagogical strategy that Mr.
Jacobson deemed "educational gold."
But even there, hurdles have
appeared.
Shortly after Oculus VR was
acquired by Facebook, Markus
Persson, the creator of Minecraft
and the owner of the company that
developed and released the game,
posted a statement on his blog.
"I definitely want to be a part of
VR, but I will not work with Facebook,"
he wrote. "There's nothing
about their history that makes me
trust them."
Companies such as YouVisit,
meanwhile, are beginning to hedge
their bets, developing virtual-reality
tools not just for the Oculus Rift,
TIMELINE: See an interactive
timeline of past coverage
about virtual reality and its
potential role in K-12 education.
www.edweek.org/go/vr-timeline
but also for Google's new Cardboard
do-it-yourself virtual-reality kit and,
potentially, for the anticipated outcome
of Sony's foray into virtual
reality, known as Project Morpheus.
"We're exploring other platforms,
because we don't know when the
Rift is going to be ready," said Endri
Tolka, the co-founder and chief financial
officer of the New York Citybased
YouVisit. "But Oculus is by
far the strongest and most robust
[virtual-reality] platform out there."
YouVisit works with colleges and
universities to build virtual campus
tours for prospective students.
Founded in 2009, the company
began with Web-based tours. In
2010, it released its first mobile app.
Just this year, it finished adapting
its more than 1,000 tours for the
Oculus Rift.
Students considering West Virginia
University, for example, can
now strap on the headset and find
themselves at the 50-yard line of
Mountaineer Field, in the middle
of the marching band's pre-footballgame
routine, or looking up into
stands filled with thousands of fans.
Initially, the company's plan is
to develop virtual-reality tours for
colleges and recruiters, who will
in turn provide them to recruiters
armed with the Oculus Rift at fairs
and other recruitment events. Eventually,
the company hopes to encourage
the adoption of the devices by
high school guidance counselors so
that students can "visit" any college
they desire from their counselor's
office.
"We feel the platform is going to
be very big two or three years from
now," Mr. Tolka said. "We wanted to
be one of the first to get on."
Coverage of entrepreneurship and
innovation in education and school
design is supported in part by a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation of
New York. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
This new policing policy for the Los Angeles
Unified district is meant to reverse an era of zero
tolerance that put arrests and juvenile-justice
referrals ahead of counseling services and other
interventions for struggling students. Mounting
research shows students who get into trouble with
law enforcement are at a greater risk for dropping
out of school and ending up in jail or prison.
And students who end up getting arrested or
referred to juvenile justice are disproportionately
African-American and Latino, studies show. The
same is true in the Los Angeles schools, where
nearly 95 percent of the 1,100 arrests made by the
district's police department in 2013 were of students
of color.
Under the new LAUSD policy, most fights between
students at school will have to be referred to two
off-site intervention centers. And rather than
ticketing and referring students to juvenile court
for offenses such as trespassing or damaging school
property, police will send them to an off-site center
for positive discipline interventions.
New York Union Withholds
Gubernatorial Endorsement
| TEACHER BEAT | A pitch for governor is
conspicuously missing from New York State United
Teachers' recent list of endorsements for federal and
state offices.
NYSUT also sat out the 2010 gubernatorial race,
in which Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, prevailed.
Cuomo has tussled with the union over several
issues, including his support of more charter schools
and of teacher evaluations tied in part to student
test scores.
This news is interesting-if inside baseball-also
because an internal split within NYSUT largely had
to do with the union's relationship to Cuomo and
just how forcefully it should oppose him.
Union critic Mike Antonucci notes that this turn
of events means the winner of the election won't be
beholden to NYSUT.
-LESLI A. MAXWELL
-STEPHEN SAWCHUK
Camp Inspires Students
To Design App for Giving
| DIGITAL EDUCATION | While many middle schoolers
are focused on getting to the next level of popular
games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, others,
like 13-year-old Aaliyah Trader, are designing apps
that give back to their communities.
The rising 8th grader at Achievement First
Endeavor Middle School, a charter school in New
York's Brooklyn borough, helped design the app
Sharety as part of the design and business-plan
competition called Battle of the Apps. The free app
uses geolocation technology to help users find local
charities and donate.
"We didn't want to do just another game. I like
to try new and different things, and we wanted to
try new ideas with this app," said Aaliyah. "One of
my teammates had the idea to make an app that
really gives back to charities, and I liked the idea
of sharing so that people could give charities the
things that they really need."
This "CEO Bootcamp"-for Career Exploration
Opportunities-summer program comes as many
schools are using app-development competitions
to spark student interest in entrepreneurship
while exposing them to entry-level computerprogramming
skills and business management.
-DANIELLE WILSON
EDUCATION WEEK | August 27, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 11
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Education Week - August 27, 2014

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