In this study off-the-shelf technology is evaluated in the context of an immersive virtual environment application for use by teachers in a classroom lecture. First, four input devices are compared according to efficiency and user preferences when utilized for a system control interface. This is done in an experiment performed on high school teachers. The input devices are a pen-operated graphics tablet, a touch-operated graphics tablet, a Microsoft Kinect for hand tracking and a Nintendo Wii Nunchuk controller. The pen and tablet interface proved most efficient and preferred by the teachers and is used in evaluation of navigation and selection interfaces using the device. In a second experiment with the teachers, they significantly preferred a grabbing the air navigation interface over a joystick-inspired interface. The results show no significant preferences between a gaze directed pointing interface and an image-plane interface when evaluating selection methods. Overall, results and observations of the experiments show that the novel interfaces utilizing the pen and tablet device can be quickly understood and can support a wide variety of tasks in an immersive virtual environment.