Sand Springs science teacher gets $18,000 grant for virtual reality classroom headsets - Tulsa World

SAND SPRINGS — Sixth-grade subject teacher Sandy Gilstrap answered the sound connected her schoolroom doorway Tuesday greeting with a grade of excitement that adjacent a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes victor would envy.

Gilstrap’s ain mentation of a “prize patrol” filled the Sixth Grade Center hallway outside, with representatives from the Sand Springs Education Foundation, Sand Springs Public Schools officials and journalists connected manus to witnesser the presumption of a assistance for much than $18,000, 1 of the largest the instauration has given, to money a virtual world learning strategy for her classes.

Gilstrap instantaneously burst into tears and began jumping up and down.

“Did I get it?” she screamed. “I’m truthful excited!”

Gilstrap volition usage the $18,799.98 assistance to acquisition Class VR, a acceptable of 30 virtual world headsets that volition let a schoolroom afloat of students to spell anywhere, bash anything, spot anything — virtually.

“We’ll beryllium capable to not conscionable look astatine cells but, like, spell inside of cells and bash hands-on virtual dissections and each kinds of worldly that we couldn’t usually do,” said Gilstrap, a Sand Springs Public Schools alumna who is successful her 17th twelvemonth of teaching.

She said Class VR comes with a room of astir 15,000 lessons successful a dizzying array of taxable matter, a diagnostic that volition payment not conscionable Gilstrap’s students but others, arsenic well.

“This is thing not conscionable for my people but for each of america to use,” she said, adding that the program volition “take our learning to a antithetic level.”

And adjacent to immoderate antithetic places. Although people tract trips are much often falling unfortunate to acquisition backing woes these days, with the Class VR technology, students won’t beryllium stuck successful the schoolroom for long.

“With the click of a button, a teacher tin nonstop retired from the (system’s) room a acquisition … truthful we tin each spell connected a tract travel oregon bash a dissection together,” Gilstrap said.

Better still, virtual world allows students to instrumentality tract trips to destinations nary schoolhouse autobus tin reach, specified arsenic wrong the quality body, making the abstract imaginable.

“What a mode to marque thing memorable and stick,” said Gilstrap, who was the Teacher of the Year for the Sixth Grade Center past twelvemonth and a finalist for the territory Teacher of the Year. “We tin basal determination and speech astatine them each day, but to really larn thing you person to bash it — to truly recognize it.”

Teams from the Sand Springs Education Foundation fanned retired crossed the schoolhouse territory Tuesday to contiguous assistance awards totaling immoderate $85,000 to 41 recipients, said Tirita Montross, the foundation’s enforcement director.

A committee reviewed the 50 applications that were submitted for the yearly grants, for which immoderate teacher successful the territory tin apply, she said. Grants aren’t intended for furnishings oregon gathering enhancements, and they’re not truly awarded for day-to-day schoolhouse supplies, either, Montross said.

“It has to beryllium benignant of a project” oregon thing wherever “it’s going to past beyond conscionable this year,” she said. “It’s usually a peculiar task that they wouldn’t beryllium capable to get funded done the district.”

The instauration archetypal awarded grants successful 1989 and has since distributed much than $2 million. This year’s $85,000 full is the second-highest, conscionable shy of the $89,000 record.

Sand Springs Public Schools Superintendent Sherry Durkee said the wealth isn’t conscionable astir reading, penning and arithmetic.

“It’s an enhancement. It’s what makes pupil engagement possible,” she said. “We thatch the curriculum — determination is nary doubt. But specified enhancements marque a measurable quality successful pupil engagement.”

“It’s astir getting creativity into the classroom,” Durkee said. “And I truly don’t cognize of a assemblage that has much originative radical than education. So they constitute immoderate beauteous phenomenal assistance applications.”