Welcome to the Inclusive Classroom community for Microsoft Education!

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MikeTholfsen wrote:

Hi everyone, we're excited to now have a space dedicated to Inclusive Classroom for EDU. My name is Mike Tholfsen, and I'm Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft Education product team in Redmond, WA. 

Nice to meet you, Mr. Tholfsen!

This community is a place for you to ask questions about others' experiences, share ideas, learn best practices, hear about product updates, collaborate with others using our Inclusive Classroom technologies, and have direct interaction with the product and engineering teams.

Awesome! I love the culture of collaboration expressed here.

We're so excited you've joined us and look forward to your posts and contributions to the community.

I'm super excited, too!

If you have any questions about the community, please ask them below :)

I guess my main questions right now relate to using mixed reality to make learning more accessible to students with special needs and help increase achievement of their IEP goals. How is this currently being done, and what goals can we shoot for in the future? Is there a DevOps crew devoted to this specific topic already? If so, can I join? :)

I also wanted to just introduce myself quickly. You can read my full story in my profile if you're really bored and need to kill some time, but in a nutshell:

• I taught public, high school biology for five years in Arizona.
• I worked at an inclusive school and had a large percentage of special ed students in all of my classes.
• I was pretty passionate about and quite successful at providing effective instruction to these students.
• I was forced to medically retire and decided to start a business selling my art online.
• Designing my website introduced me to the world of computer programming and its infinite applications.
• I'm teaching myself to become a developer so I can still serve a purpose in the education sector, particularly by using VR to increase engagement and increase accessbility of content for all learners.

Thanks for reading and thanks again for the warm welcome. I'm so looking forward to what we can accomplish through collaboration in this community!