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Welcome to the premier episode of the XR for Learning Podcast, with your host, Julie Smithson! On this show, we'll be exploring in-depth the power XR has to improve the learning experience for mankind across all sectors. We start that mission speaking with the co-founders of Educators in VR, who host the world's largest immersive conference for educators, to share and explore VR together.

Julie: Welcome to the XR for Learning podcast and this is your host, Julie Smithson. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. I'd like to introduce two of my first guests, Lorelle VanFossen and Daniel Dyboski-Bryant from Educators In VR. Lorelle is a co-founder of Educators In VR, an open membership and social profit organization dedicated to providing training and educational programs that will integrate virtual technologies into education for educators, learners, researchers, and passionate enthusiasts. And she's a keynote speaker, a trainer, an educator, writer/author, and consultant specializing in digital storytelling and web publishing. Daniel is a lifelong educator specializing in virtual and augmented reality, immersive technologies, 360 media, teacher training, communication, and languages. And he speaks five languages. He's the [co-]founder of Educators In VR, and I've been looking forward to having a conversation today about the international summit. Welcome, both of you.

Daniel: Thank you very much.

Lorelle: Thank you.

Daniel: Excited to be here.

Julie: I want to go deep into the international summit. But maybe if you guys can kind of talk about how was Educators In VR born? Like, where did it come from? And maybe you guys can talk about how you guys collaborated.

Lorelle: A moment of insanity. Well, how it actually got started is that I was talking to Dr. Erica Southgate in VR, we were in AltspaceVR. And I said, we keep bitching about all the different pros and cons of educators really struggling to embrace this technology and the challenges that face them, and the eagerness and passion that so many of them had. And I said, we need to have an educators in VR meetup. This is silly. We need to to make this a bigger conversation, because it's a huge conversation. And the moment we started talking about it, we just exploded with ideas and we realized it was much bigger than the two of us. And so she brought in Daniel and another person, and we had our first Educators In VR meet-up. We thought there would be, I don't know, what do you think, 20, 30 people? There were something like 180.

Daniel: Yeah.

Lorelle: [laughs] It just-- no one knew how to use any of the tools, or anything to accommodate that many people. So it became a-- It was great. It was fantastic, very few people in front of the scenes knew that everybody was panicking on the back end, because it was just overload. And we went, "Oh, there's something there." And it ended up that Daniel and I founded it, made it official. We host, once a week, workshops in AltspaceVR, but we also travel to other platforms and do all kinds of special events. And we've had over-- I think it's almost 5,000 people come through in a little over a year. And now we have this 2020 Educators In VR International Summit, which again started with "Oh, why don't we do this? We'll get like 40 people together, and see what happens. It'll be a few days and we'll do this conference." And we put out the speaker form during the holidays. I mean, who pays attention to anything during the holidays? And we had over 150 applications.

Julie: Incredible. Incredible. It's stunning.

Lorelle: And there's this thing that happens when you're doing any kind of an event. You go, all right