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Teaching a language is a lot easier when you share a room with your pupil, and have the benefit of human interaction and body language to bolster the lesson. With VR, today's guest Michael McDonald is able to do that for students in Norway, all the way from his HQ in Italy.

Julie: All right. Welcome, everybody, to the XR for Learning podcast. Today, I have Michael McDonald on the show. Originally from London, Michael now lives in Italy and graduated with a degree in German and business management after two years working in the U.K. public sector in HR and recruitment. He left his job in London to get back to what he loved to do most, and that was all about languages and education. So I would love to introduce Michael to the show, and I would love to have you tell us more about Gold Lotus, what you're working on in the classroom using XR technologies, and talk about all the things that are going so well for you, educating these kids through virtual reality. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael: Thanks for having me, Julie. And hello to any of the listeners out there that will listen to this later on. So really nice to be here. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about what I've been up to. But it's not all about me. It's about certainly the students and the teachers that I'm working with, and also the wider community and there's a whole lot of stuff we can talk about on today's episode regarding those. So yeah. In terms of your first point about Gold Lotus. Yes, it's a kind of consultancy I set up here in Italy a few years ago after a good few years of exploring everything from Google Cardboard to 15-pound Amazon headsets -- sorry, headsets from Amazon like virtual reality -- and up to the latest Oculus Go, Oculus Quest and everything else in between. So I set up the consultancy, Gold Lotus, which basically reflects this kind of idea that, you know, anybody -- and I'm going to get deep here, I'm sorry about that -- but anybody can grow from those muddy waters.You might be a student or teacher kind of in the doldrums, maybe thinking, "well, what can I do to maybe accelerate my learning, or improve the way that I learn languages," because that's kind of my field. And it's just kind of a way for people to be pushed by me, hopefully in the right direction, and shown alternative ways of using this new technology within a learning context. So that's a bit of the background.

Julie: Yeah. And that's fantastic. I've been showing up to some of the YouTube classes that you've shown on LinkedIn, and they just fascinate me because I think you've taken teaching to a whole different level. I've had several conversations with people about your lessons, just in different contexts. And it comes back to really testing who the teacher is, now, and the personality, the intonation in your voice, because these students can't see you. And I think you have risen to the top, in my mind, of having that voice that is going to engage the kids and have them respond back. And I think that's one of the best things that you've seen as obviously teaching these languages, that you're encouraging these students to speak more and more and learn the English language. So maybe you can talk to the response of the students with some of the lessons that you've been doing.

Michael: Thanks for the compliments, but I really can't take credit for those lessons. In a sense, yes, I provide the platform for them, just as you are doing now with your podcast. The vibe of the experience or the interaction, it does depends on the person with whom you're talking, or the people. And so I guess that from my perspective, I'm just grateful that the tools are out there now for me to meet these people. When I talk about people, I'm talking -- at the moment -- so the students in Norway with the school