#372 – Immersive Technologies in K–12 Education, with Gaspare Lipari

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What is extended reality (XR)?
• What are some examples of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)?
• How can XR experiences be integrated into a general education classroom?
• How can XR benefit students with special needs?
• How might you leverage XR in your school?

• Unbound Innovations (Gaspare Lipari)
• Greenwich Alliance for Education (official website)

#372 Immersive Technologies in K–12 Education, with Gaspare Lipari

AVID Open Access
41 min

Keywords
immersive technology, K-12 education, student agency, technology integration, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended realities, educational innovation, student engagement, special education, virtual college tours, empathy tools, professional development, summer camp

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Gaspare Lipari 0:00 I want my students to be pioneers and creators. I think every kid has some genius inside of them, and I think that the more that they go through education and the less creativity they’re allowed to have, we’re losing that spark.

Winston Benjamin 0:14 The topic for today’s podcast is immersive technology in K through 12 education with Gaspare Lipari. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that every learner can develop student agency. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:35 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:46 I’m Paul Beckerman.

Winston Benjamin 0:48 And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators,

Paul Beckermann 0:52 and we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:56 Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:01 Our quote is from our guest from today, Gaspare. He writes on his website, Unbound Innovations: “I share my love of technology and innovation with my students, hoping to inspire, motivate and prepare young minds for what comes next.” What are y’all thinking about that?

Rena Clark 1:22 I think for me, it’s that centering on love of learning, and it’s really about loving learning and then focusing on that word innovate. And we can innovate in so many different ways, but currently, in the current world we are in, it seems technology is a great on ramp for innovation, and then to inspire, motivate and prepare. It really helps us speak the language of the students that we’re supporting.

I always think back to, I think it was actually from Summer Institute. I got to teach a lovely community of practice. But we always do an activity, and in the end, we show that our high school seniors this year were born in 2007. And we think, when was the iPhone released? Y’all know, 2007. Our high school seniors have never known a world that a computer wasn’t in our pockets. And so we’re preparing them for their future, not our past. A good on ramp for that, for innovation is through technology. And being able to grasp that, to support our students where they are, is so important.

Paul Beckermann 2:35 I second that, Rena, I totally agree with you. It’s such a great goal, right, to inspire, motivate and prepare young minds for what comes next. I mean, that’s what we want to do in education, that and especially now with this rapid evolution of AI, it’s kind of hard to know exactly what comes next, but I agree with you, it’s going to be this blend of technology and innovation that is going to shape what this future looks like, and our kids are going to be the ones who do it. So let’s empower them with the skills that they need to be successful in that world.

Winston Benjamin 3:06 Again, right? It’s about the next step, as we want to bring in the fact that we’re not really experts on this thing. We have a guest who is an expert, who we’ve even been citing in this conversation. So I just really want to say, welcome to our guest. Gaspare Lipari is a teacher at Western Middle School in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he’s an instructional facilitator at Unbound Innovations. In 2023, he was awarded the Distinguished Teacher of the Year for Greenwich Public Schools. Okay, so we got an expert in the room, really. So before we start, we’d like to ground our guest in understanding who you are. Can you just give us a little bit about yourself and why you’ve been so interested in technology?

Gaspare Lipari 3:56 Sure. My name is Gaspare Lipari or LA pari. I go by many names, but those are just two of them. I am a lifelong learner. I totally agree with Rena. My passion for technology, I actually grew up in Brooklyn, son of Italian immigrants. Actually, my first language wasn’t English, but I learned as I went.

When I was eight years old, living in Brooklyn, I got a computer, 1979 Texas Instruments 99/4A. I remember the brand too. Then I got a Commodore 64. My passion for technology started back then. I started coding in BASIC. I was really into creating and seeing what was possible. So from that moment on, I always looked forward and ahead, learning about emerging technologies, what was new and how it could be applied to the real world.

When I graduated college at SUNY Albany, I started working for AIG in Manhattan. So I got a taste of the corporate world for three years, and I was working on my master’s degree. Then I started teaching down in Hollis, Queens, a pretty tough area, and we had students that were not well off at all. I was there for three years, and then I moved on to Western Middle School in Greenwich, and I moved up to Port Chester. Now I’m up in New Milford, Connecticut, so that’s a little about me.

Paul Beckermann 5:37 And I understand that you won a grant from the Greenwich Alliance for Education. You want to tell us a little bit about that. What was the grant that you earned and what was it for? What motivated you to apply for it?

Gaspare Lipari 5:50 Absolutely, yeah. The Greenwich Alliance for Education is amazing. Julie Farinaz, she’s the one who actually nominated me for Distinguished Teacher, and so I was awarded that award through her, and she also awarded me some grants. I first heard about their program in 2018 and I was, “Wow, I can get money to do something really cool for my students and do something in technology.” So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to bring some of the ideas that I had in my head, bring them to life.

In the education system we live in now, it really doesn’t encourage creativity or imagination as much as it should or has in the past. And I had so many great ideas that you need financing for; you need to have the ideas and make them real. And I’ve always been passionate about finding new ways to engage students and have them interested in what we’re doing, things that are hands-on, immersive, interactive. So when I find a new website, I remember finding Padlet and all these other sites that were great. I love having students do presentations or create projects, and so all those things kind of came into fruition in my mind when I was thinking about this grant.

I have seen firsthand how those experiences can be for learning, those hands-on experiences, because when I taught in New York for those three years, we built a new STEM lab. It was a $100,000 lab that they built, and it was called Scan Tech. I taught it from the beginning, and it was a hands-on approach to learning, where we used wind tunnels and earthquake simulators and levitation tracks and circuit boards. The kids would go to each of these modules, and they would be instructed step-by-step on how to use them and how to manipulate them, how to build things and test them on these wind tunnels and earthquake simulators, and use their foundations in math and science in order to engage in those things and learn.

Now, if they fail, great. They try again, and it’s all about experimentation. To me, failing is probably the most valuable lesson. You’re going to remember it so much more, and you’re going to learn from that. They would also have remediation on these computers that they had, where they would learn math concepts that they were getting wrong based on their experiments. So it was my favorite teaching experience that I’ve ever had.

Because that’s always been in the back of my mind, when I left New York, I was, “I want to bring this to Greenwich somehow.” And so this was an opportunity to do that. Scan Tech, I don’t know if it exists anymore. I don’t think it does, but I thought that immersive technologies, using XR, which is extended realities, would be a great way to use a lot of those different the same things I learned from that program, and bring them to Greenwich for my students.

Paul Beckermann 8:57 So the grant was for how much, and it was to fund specifically that XR experience. Is that correct?

Gaspare Lipari 9:04 Yeah. So it was, I think, a 20-page grant proposal I put together. So it wasn’t just one singular idea, but it was initially, I believe, the first year was $40,000 or 42. The second year was the pandemic year. So it was 2019 when I got the first grant, and that led into 2020, which ended abruptly a few months before school ended. And then we were limited somewhat the next year. But I got 25,000 the next year. Altogether, it was over $100,000 that the Greenwich Alliance gave me for this program, and most of it has been well spent. Some mistakes you make, and you learn from those, as far as what programs to invest in and what not to, and what works and what doesn’t. But it’s really been an amazing opportunity.

Rena Clark 10:01 So I think I want to dig in a little bit more around these extended realities, a little bit more for our listeners, and we have K-12 here. So if you could talk a little bit more around VR, AR, those extended realities, and how what you’re doing there, and continue to do, integrate with the educational setting. How does that integrate with the learning?

Gaspare Lipari 10:26 Sure. So XR stands for extended realities. It includes virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. To lay out each one of those: virtual reality is where you wear a headset and you are completely immersed into your digital environment, where you can interact with objects, you can create, you can experience events, or witness history. I recently did a unit on the JFK assassination. So they’re on that street in Houston, and they’re watching the motorcade go by. They go up to the Book Depository to see where the shooter was. And so it’s an experience, and Anne Frank’s house. So they go through these immersive technologies, through these immersive experiences with a headset on, and all they see is that experience. There are no distractions. It’s 100% focus on what you’re looking at.

Augmented reality is a digital layer in the real world. For people that might be familiar, Pokémon Go was a huge app that a lot of people had; that’s augmented reality, when you have digital layers in the real world. There’s also some that use triggers. I’ve had students bring books to life and comic books and Merge Cubes with augmented reality and create characters as well. So it’s a good creative tool.

Mixed Reality is what you see now, the newer headsets that came out with Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3. Those use a mixed reality approach to devices where you see both of those different realities mixed together at times or interacting with each other. So that is how that works, to give you some examples.

These are game changers in education, in my opinion. It helps students by removing distractions. As I said before, it makes learning more immersive. We use a program called Prisms VR, which the Greenwich district has been kind enough to fund because it’s an expensive program. In Prisms, it’s focused on math and science. Students go into real-world scenarios where they apply math formulas and geometry, algebra, trigonometry to solve problems.

They might analyze the angles and forces in a bridge to ensure that it’s stable. They’ll use algebra to optimize a flight path of a drone. They’ll use these concepts to manipulate things in their environments, do the math, and the teacher on the platform, on their computer, can see what each student is doing. They get screenshots and follow along. But the students are actually applying the math skills. They’re going to ask, “Why am I doing this math? I’m never going to use it in my life.” Well, they’re learning that, yes, it does apply to life, and they’re actually using it.

It’s also memorable. They’re not going to forget what they’re learning. It’s transformative. They lose all the elements of fear, of hesitation, of timidity. They’re risk-takers and engineers now. They aren’t afraid in VR; they just kind of—they’re alone in that world. When they’re alone in that world, and they don’t see the other students, they don’t see the things that hold them back sometimes, and I think that’s probably one of the biggest obstacles, especially in middle school for kids. They just fear making a mistake or doing something wrong. But in VR, they’re taking risks and doing things that they never could otherwise, mixing chemicals together that they can’t do in real life.

Winston Benjamin 14:09 I appreciate that, because I have a joy for your classroom, sitting and hearing you talking about it. But there’s something that you did that I really want to dig in a little bit, because this thing is about my own application for college. I was not trying to go, or could go to, as many places that I could, that I dreamt about. So I understand that you’re using technology to facilitate virtual college visits for your AVID students. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What is it, and how did it come about? What gave you the inspiration to even do something like this?

Gaspare Lipari 14:47 Before I even submitted the grant proposal, I reached out to anyone I could in the industry. I looked up all companies out there that did anything with virtual or augmented reality, and I reached out to them. I looked into all the colleges that were doing stuff, and I reached out to them, and I got some feedback, and I spoke to these people, because I was on an island by myself. There was nobody else that I knew that was doing anything this.

Even these universities were very narrow with their focus. Yale, who came to our school the first year I had this, they had a program called “Play for Real Lab” where they created games for kids, high school and middle school: anti-vaping games, alcohol things. And now it’s called XR Pediatrics. So it’s a part of Yale Medical School that does this. And so they came and taught our kids about that stuff that they were doing and how to do it themselves.

But part of the process of me doing all this research is I did find all these virtual tours of colleges, and they started to grow. There were two or three in particular that had lots of different universities. As I said, when I started this program, COVID hit the following year. Students in AVID could not visit the colleges that they wanted to, and so they were all closed. There were no colleges to go to. So they said, “Hey, can we do something?” And I said, “Absolutely.”

We made a worksheet so students could have a guide, things to look for, and they did virtual tours in VR. They would come to my room. I would set it up for their classes, and seventh and eighth graders would go to whatever colleges they wanted to. So it wasn’t just limited to our geography. It was whatever schools they dreamed of going to. They could see in virtual reality and see what it was, the different facilities and programs that they had. And I just thought it was a great experience for them.

Paul Beckermann 16:52 That’s so cool. You’re breaking down barriers using the technology, and I also understand that you’ve broken down some barriers and set up some AR and VR experiences for your special education students. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Gaspare Lipari 17:04 Absolutely. I used the word transformative before. I think it was probably the most transformative for special education students, whatever their special need, or their disability, they face challenges. A lot of them with focus, with engagement, with the traditional learning environment, and with the technology that I have and the ways I’ve been able to apply it, those students have been probably the most engaged. They’ll actually come during their off periods or lunch, or after school, to do extra, when they wouldn’t even sit there with a pen and pencil in their math class. I think it just changed the world for them.

There was one student in particular, I remember, who we did—we do capsule projects in eighth grade. And she had a lot of struggles. It was optional for kids to come to school. She didn’t come to school till the very end of that year. She was remote most of the time. And she did her project in virtual reality, and shared a lot that nobody really knew about, that she was struggling with. So it takes away the fear and intimidation that exists in the world, and it captures their full attention.

The impact is significant. I had my classes, my tech classes, which I do this program in. I had them do this project with a program called Florio. We have a decent-sized autistic population, students with autism, students with Down syndrome. We had those students do this program with Florio, and it helped them to develop social and life skills. The students would pick what skills that they were going to teach them, and they would run these programs with the help of the aides, and the results were immediate. It was amazing. A student who would run out of the classroom, not say goodbye, nothing, would after doing the greeting skill, shake hands with all the teachers and say goodbye and make eye contact. It was kind of magical to see that happen and to have our students actually do that, make that happen, and I was just facilitating. It was a great experience.

All of these students, whether they’re in special education or not, they get a sense of accomplishment, self-confidence, and I think it carries over into other areas of their education. It’s hard to measure, but I do feel it helps them in other subject areas, with the perspective and the way to see those subjects and topics.

Rena Clark 19:51 Yeah, it’s often hard to see those ripple effects or measure them. You’ve talked a lot; I know at the beginning you were talking about imagination, using imagination and creativity. You’ve talked a little bit how some students have really been able to learn things through these experiences, and you alluded to a student who was able to create something through VR. So I would love just to know or talk about maybe a few more examples where creation and imagination are being used by students. And maybe, this started with you in a grant, but even as you talked about working with special education, how has it grown to incorporate other areas of your building, not just you anymore?

Gaspare Lipari 20:39 So yeah, my focus from the beginning was always to maximize the impact and to reach as many students as I could. And I saw that opportunity to reach out to the other teachers I work with in all three grades, to show them ways that they can integrate this technology in their classes, to offer every period I had off, my lunch, whatever, to have them bring their classes to my room so that we can implement some of these activities. Do some professional development with them, to show them, “Hey, these are things you could do,” finding out what their curriculum was, and showing them what applications would work best with those. So trying to enhance the learning experience for students, and help them with their curriculum to make it more impactful as well.

I taught English for 25 years, more or less 24 years, so in English, I did find lots of applications for this program. I had students, when I was teaching a sixth-grade class, they were doing A Long Walk to Water. There were some 360 videos I found that were perfect, aligned with some of the themes and topics that book was about. And so all the sixth graders were doing that.

I’ve had students do their personal narratives and memoirs on Merge Cubes and augmented reality, make them interactive, and use CoSpaces to create these stories where they walk through their life experiences. It helps students to connect to whatever they’re doing on a deeper level, and sparks discussions. It’s not just a simple sit there and read a book or a textbook, or have a teacher speaking to you about something; you’re interacting with this material.

To keep going, in social studies, there’s, as I mentioned, the JFK assassination tour of Anne Frank’s house. They can go on a bombing run in a World War Two fighter plane with the real narration of the crew on the airplane. They’re getting a firsthand experience of these things, as well as hearing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Science classes: there’s tons of different things they could do, from anatomy to dissecting frogs to studying all the science technologies, especially augmented reality. My science teachers in eighth grade use it for when they’re doing the planets. Math teachers use Prisms VR. There’s just an unlimited amount of things. I do Newton’s laws with the students.

Even if the subject teachers don’t have the time in their curriculum to do some of these applications, I have four classes every semester that I teach these subjects to, and so I’ll put that content into what I’m doing with the students, so they’re actually getting that enrichment as well. And it’s learning subjects that they’re not going to get in middle school, and maybe even in high school. So yeah, it’s pretty much broadcasted all building.

Winston Benjamin 23:42 I really love how you are engaged in every part of the school building, students’ lives, and it seems you’re augmenting a lot of their realities. But I just got to ask the one question: what are you doing in the summer? Do you have any time off? What do you do this summer? Do you have a summer camp? Can you tell us a little bit about your summer camp? You’re inspiring me to do something more.

Gaspare Lipari 24:11 When you’re passionate about something, it doesn’t really feel like work, and when you have the satisfaction of seeing that spark, you want to keep getting it. It makes you hungry for more. So yeah, and with the Greenwich Alliance, going back to 2020, that summer where everyone stayed home, which is also another 360 video experience, they get to go outside in VR, when everyone stayed home to see what it was in those big cities.

When everyone stayed home in 2020, we distributed headsets through AVID, through the Greenwich Alliance. We had eight students, high school and college, who were in the AVID program, and the Greenwich Alliance actually paid them to be part of this program. It was a summer, or you can call it a remote camp program, and so I used VR with these kids, and we actually met in virtual reality during that summer and had conversations. That’s part of why I learned from the students and from these experiences.

There was a ninth-grade girl who was reflecting on the experience and said there were two boys who were seniors at UConn, and she said, “At first, I was very intimidated, and I didn’t know what it was going to be, but when I was in virtual reality, and we were all avatars, and just having discussions, I just felt everyone was the same. There were no differences. Everyone was just there, and there was no intimidation at all.” So it was a really cool experience there.

I told the Greenwich Alliance—and Julie giving me this opportunity to do what I do, to do what I love—I’ve been teaching for 27 years now, and I don’t know how many years I have left, but I want to return that favor. I want to give back to the Greenwich Alliance, to give opportunities to other teachers to innovate and to do new things. So I asked them if they would partner with me, and they did.

We’ve been running a summer camp for the last three, four years, and we do it concurrently with summer school in the same building, so the superintendent has been kind enough to allow us to share the space. We’ve done that and invited students from around Greenwich, from around the community, given scholarships every year to at least five students where they didn’t have to pay a penny or they pay very little. So it’s been a very rewarding experience. It’s also given me an opportunity to meet these kids, because we’ve had kids that were entering sixth grade. So I haven’t met these kids yet because they were in elementary school, so it gave an introduction to them before they would make it to the middle school. So it’s been great. I was very happy that I was able to give back to the Greenwich Alliance in a small way.

Paul Beckermann 27:06 It’s cool to see it went from a dream in your head to your classroom, to other classrooms, to the AVID program, to special ed students, to the summer program. I understand there’s even some reach out into the wider community. You want to talk about, maybe how you’ve extended beyond?

Gaspare Lipari 27:25 I have. I’ve done some programs at the Greenwich Library. They heard about me because they knew about the Alliance and Julie, and so they reached out to me two or three years ago and asked me to do some programs there with virtual reality. And so I’ve done a number of programs there, and somehow Amy from the Greenwich Library put my name on a message board that libraries share, saying, “Hey, we’re doing this great thing in Greenwich Library.” And so I got lots of calls from libraries across the state.

I’ve been doing programs in Milford, Danbury, Bethel, all over Connecticut, just whatever they want: coding drones, Merge Cubes. We did snow globes in December with Merge Cubes and augmented reality. Some of that stuff is on my website, but it’s cool to be able to go around and spread this to other places.

The more I’m out there, the more I see, the more of these conferences I’ve been to. I went to the BETT conference last year in England. I went to one in Florida the year before that, the FETC conference. And it just doesn’t seem there’s anything what I’m doing out there, or maybe limited, but I just want to promote it more. I want to expose the world to what we’re doing, because I think it’s so fantastic.

Rena Clark 29:01 Well, I think that alludes a little bit to this next question about maybe a dream you have for the future. It sounds getting some more people involved, having a larger community. But what other types of dreams might you have for the future use of AR, VR, or now, as I’m going to be calling it, XR?

Gaspare Lipari 29:24 Yeah. So for the future, I mean, I want my students to be pioneers and creators. I think that’s something this technology has as a way of encouraging and facilitating. It’s not a passive experience for the most part. There are some passive experiences that are great, but I think if we can take this technology and education and build it into what we do in the education system to help foster creativity and imagination, I think those are some missing elements that would really help students to thrive and remember their learning more: to create art that you can’t create in any other medium, to produce music, to lose the fears and the intimidation of being a classroom if you have those anxieties, to become engineers and coders, build new, innovative ideas, just to become the geniuses that are within them. I think every kid has some genius inside of them, and I think that the more that they go through education and the less creativity they’re allowed to have, that spark is being lost. It’s not something that’s being ignited. We’re losing that spark. So I feel if we can integrate this more into a broader educational world, I think that that would make a huge difference in the future.

Rena Clark 30:59 Well, I think one thing might help that is if we provide some tools, maybe in our toolkit, to help some people get started or take those next steps. So let’s go ahead and jump into our toolkit.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 31:15 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? What is in the tool? What? Check it out.

Winston Benjamin 31:22 All right, so I’m going to go first and I’m going to plug us, but still not really plug us that badly. But check out our previous episodes, because a lot of times when we hear “being innovative” and “add innovation into the classroom,” it feels so big. So check out our earlier episodes about how to slowly integrate some innovations into your classroom, step by step, so it’s not so daunting. So check out our previous episodes of that, and then try to see how far you can push it.

Paul Beckermann 31:55 All right, I’m going to follow up on one of the things that Gaspare said. He mentioned the 360-degree videos. That’s a great way to start. If you go to YouTube and you just search for 360-degree videos, there are lots of them out there, and even if you don’t have the headset, you can still move around within the videos. You can even search for “360 video travel” or put a keyword with it. I just did that earlier today, and I was in New York, and then I was in England, in London. You can go to places you could never go to before, and have the kids look around too. Kids can take control of some of those choices. So that’s maybe a way to get started, if you’re interested.

Rena Clark 32:38 I think about my own kiddos would much rather do that than explore in other ways. If I was thinking about something that was brought up, it’s just having a community. And I really love that we have these innovators going out first, but just the idea of if you are able to go to a conference, and I will say, being in person, sometimes the thing I get most out of a conference is not the session, but it’s the people I’m talking to, making a connection and those side conversations and learning about what they’re doing.

Then, all of a sudden, I might be one of a few, and now I have a partner. I might follow up with an email. Those professional learning networks you can create, and you can do that in person. You can also do that remotely. Whether you find different groups, you can use social media in that way and find groups that you can chat with and get information, but just learning from others how they innovate.

Listening to podcasts is so powerful and another huge tool. Learn from your students. They are innovators. They are so creative. Let them take control a little bit. One way to do that is, if you haven’t heard, and it’s from the book Street Data, there are other places, but you’re doing empathy interviews. Just asking three simple, open-ended questions to your students, and you will be shocked at the brilliance that they have and advice that they may give you and information they will give you about how you might be more innovative. You can learn so much from open-ended questioning.

Gaspare Lipari 34:16 And I guess it’s my turn. Go for it, yeah. You just mentioned empathy, and I was going to mention that before. Empathy: virtual reality is one of the most powerful empathy tools in the world. I’ve been through some experiences in VR where there’s one called Notes on Blindness, and it shows you his experience going blind. You see these lights, and it’s just a powerful experience. MIT actually did a program a while back on empathy with VR, where you become a tree and someone’s cutting a branch off and a bird lands on it, and you feel everything. So it gives you that power of feeling what a tree would.

Going back to the toolbox, what you all said was definitely, I totally agree with, and I would put those in my toolbox as well. I definitely watched a lot of YouTube videos on tutorials on how to do things, or learning new ideas, or exploring some of the ideas I have. AI is a tool out there that will help you as well, in those ways. I am scared of AI with students and them losing that creativity and imagination because it’s an easy answer. But you don’t have to be on an island by yourself, as I was originally. There are definitely people out there that have answers, or that can network with you, that would be a great resource for you to get started in any of these technologies.

As you said, Paul, finding 360 videos on YouTube is definitely an easy, cheap way to do it. Google had Google hardware, where it was very inexpensive, and there are lots of options out there. For $20, you can get one of them, where you can put your phone into these little tubes, and you can watch those 360 videos in VR as well. So it’s a low-fi version of what we have, but definitely easy to do, and a great way to introduce your students to that technology.

Paul Beckermann 36:25 Awesome. Great tools. Appreciate those. All right, now it’s time for us to jump into our one thing.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 36:32 Time for that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Paul Beckermann 36:41 Okay, everybody. Final takeaway today, what’s on your mind as we depart? Winston, go first.

Winston Benjamin 36:50 I’m really feeling this idea of access and opportunity knowledge through technology. I love the fact that you could go and do a college tour virtually, because again, I would have not just picked a school a couple of hours away from me. So just thinking about how do you support students with opportunity knowledge is an AVID question. I think this is a really good way of trying to engage and do some equitable work with our students.

Paul Beckermann 37:20 For sure, Rena. Rena, what about you?

Rena Clark 37:22 I just like this idea of not being limited: not limited by geography, not limited, we talked about, by distractions, not limited by my imagination or creativity. Not limited because I can use these virtual materials, so I don’t have to buy real ones. Not limited by my mistakes, because I mix chemicals, there’s an explosion, I can do it again. I could do it over and over. So this is the idea of not being limited through this experience.

Paul Beckermann 37:54 And I was thinking about what Gaspare said, about how he was the only one thinking about this or doing this that he knew about, and how he kept being persistent and following his dreams until some of this happened. And I think: follow your dreams, change the world. That might sound too much, but I don’t think it’s too big. You are changing the world in every one of those kids that gets to experience that. So I think that’s awesome, and it leads right from that quote that he said: “I think every kid has some genius inside them.” Well, here is a great way to open some doors for some of those students who maybe couldn’t access their genius in any other way. So kudos there. And Gaspare, you get to leave us with your final thought today, what’s on your mind?

Gaspare Lipari 38:42 Just feeling grateful. Grateful that I’m able to share my message with you guys and the world. Grateful that I met you guys, and I feel you guys really get it, and the opportunity to do this podcast was amazing. So I’m feeling grateful, and hopefully I can continue the work and help it to grow, and maybe this will expand my world a little bit.

Winston Benjamin 39:09 Thank you, sir. So for me, as we close out, I just want to say also thank you for coming, because again, we wouldn’t have never known to talk about this thing. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and you brought a lot of knowledge and experience and supporting us, even thinking through this. And one of the greatest parts about this, as Paul said, you could change the world. Literally, you were one teacher doing something, and it actually is impacting, and you’re connecting with somebody from across the country, in Washington State, right? That is some of the good things that we’re talking about that our kids can really start connecting and seeing places that we’ve never thought we could see. So I just love the fact that you’re expanding your students’ world by trying to make their world smaller, by getting them actively engaging in that world. So thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you.

Gaspare Lipari 40:05 I appreciate you too. Thank you.

Rena Clark 40:07 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 40:10 We invite you to visit us at AVID Open Access.org where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 40:24 We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 40:29 And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 40:33 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 40:34 You make a difference.