Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
Teaching empathy to our future citizens of the world may be the most important work that we can do as educators. And it’s not something we can force. It has to be an organic outgrowth of the other lessons we build.
Let’s look at how we might make it happen with virtual reality.
That was a note I took while experiencing students’ reactions to Google Expeditions at Lamoille Union Middle/High School this week. Audible collective “wows” along with “this is awesome” “I feel like I’m flying, that’s why I’m scared” “I love this” permeated the air as students put the cardboard devices to their faces and entered a virtual world. As the Google representative described it to one class, “buckle up your magic school bus seat belts for a virtual reality tour of National Parks and the world’s seven wonders.”
The rate at which technology changes has reached a dizzying speed, with new tools and platforms emerging constantly. But what hasn’t changed is students’ curiosity about the world and their need to explore their own place in it. Young adolescents in particular, burn with the urge to make and personalize. So what does it look like to tap into that urge as it pertains to physical landscapes?
Yes indeedy, folks, it’s time once again to talk place-based learning and edtech.
After being introduced to Booktrack Classroom at an ISTE 2015 session, it struck me as the perfect tool to help students play with the ways tone is established. One of my favorite passages that teaches the power of syntax to convey meaning is the first paragraph of Ray Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain:
Lava flows down the halls of Main Street Middle School, in Montpelier, Vermont, and you must choose whether you’ll go with the flow or try to cool off somewhere and become an igneous rock. In another portion of the school, you’re the new kid, getting a tour from one of your peers when a volcano erupts, and you have only your geology wits (and a science teacher with fabulous hair) to save you.
These are middle schoolers building mobile, place-based games with ARIS, taking advantage of the game editor’s powerful new re-design and one science educator’s trust in letting his students demonstrate what and how they learn.
Alert reader Lucia Hoegeveen asked a question about our suggestion that you create a map of a country and give each state it’s own voice. Now, as she pointed out, each Chatterpix you create can have only one mouth. So in order to make our Chatter-map, we’re going to need to app-smash Chatterpix in one of a couple different ways.
Or maybe we’ll just put them all together in a blender and hope for the best. I’ll let you know after I finish this delicious coffee.
Half of the Tarrant Institute staff and a special guest headed to Nashville last week to present at the Association for Middle Level Education Annual Conference. We set out to share with middle grades educators from around the world the incredible, tech-rich teaching happening in Vermont schools. As we always conclude after visiting national conferences, Vermont really is on the cutting edge. Here’s a roundup of our presentations about learning management systems, authentic assessment and augmented reality.
Continue reading “Innovative learning shared at Nashville conference”
One of the challenges in science is to help students make connections from concepts to their real world. This can be a particular challenge in the field of chemistry. We talk about atoms, molecules, chemical reactions… but how does that connect with the things we see every day?
Augmented reality is one way to make connections from the abstract to the real world. We’ve seen Aurasma in use in the science classroom before. This free app allows students to create content that becomes an overlay on the actual item. The “aura” is triggered through image recognition. Students can overlay videos, web content, or images on their trigger images. Allowing video and web content means that Aurasma is a great candidate for “app smashing.”
A great way to bring book covers to life with augmented reality is through the AR app Aurasma. But for some students who are shy about actually appearing in videos for book reviews or trailers can app-smash the Chatterpix app to give voice to their favorite characters from books.
It’s a great way for students to think about elements of storytelling such as point-of-view, summation, showing vs. telling
Besides, it’s just fun!
It’s super-fun to make book trailers to embed in book covers with Aurasma, but how much cooler would it be to see your friend explain *in person* why they liked that book?
You know this would rock! And be time-effective for getting a bunch of different students’ opinions embedded in your newest library display.
Absolutely doable. App-smash Touchcast with Aurasma and boom! Hear from actual, real-live people made tiny in book covers.
Let’s do this!
By now, almost everyone’s familiar with QR codes, the distinctive-looking black-and-white graphics which, when scanned, take the scanner to a url. No? Not sounding familiar? Then how about:
If you have a phone, iPad or tablet with a QR-scanning app installed (we like Barcode Generator/Reader for Android, and Scan for iOS) open it up and center your cross-hairs on the image above.
QR codes can link to websites, event notices, coupons, blog-posts, podcasts — if it’s online, you can embed it. The QR code above links to a particularly compelling documentary video made by Montpelier’s U32 students, about school consolidation in Vermont, but that’s a story for another time.
But with QR codes becoming near-ubiquitous in our everyday environment, how can you make them new again?
Here are 5 off-beat ways to use QR codes in your classroom.
Continue reading “5 off-beat ways to use QR codes in the classroom”
A while back, I was researching how to print a QR code on a cake, as you do, and stumbled across this mysterious video of a QR code made of M&Ms:
A 1-minute iPad how-to from Harwood Union Middle School science educator Brian Wagner, showing you how to save augmented reality “auras” from the popular mobile app Aurasma, to Evernote.
Wagner used Aurasma with his students this past spring in creating an augmented reality periodic table, mounted in the community gallery space at their school.
Augmented reality apps allow users to experience a layer of additional information — usually visual or auditory — meshed with everyday objects and surroundings. Here’s a look at one of our favorites.
Aurasma is a free, powerful augmented reality app for iOS and Android devices. It allows you to embed media items — videos, links, animation, other images — in static images.
(Remember that bit in Harry Potter when they’re walking through the gallery hallway at Hogwarts, and the paintings come alive? It’s a lot like that. 🙂
There are two parts to Aurasma: viewing the augmented reality content, called “auras”, and creating auras on your own. Additionally, we’ll look at how Aurasma is currently being used in schools, including one of our partner middle schools, here in Vermont.
1. Download Aurasma onto your mobile device, either through the app store (iOS) or through Google play.
2. Open up the app and create an account.
3. Auras are arranged into channels, and you have to subscribe to a channel in order to view them. So for instance, to get to the Tarrant Institute channel, tap the gray “A” symbol at the bottom of your screen, then the magnifying glass, and search on “Tarrant”.
Tap “Follow” to follow our channel and access our Aurasma content. Channels can be public or private, and are useful for grouping content by organization — like a class or school.
4. Check out some of our auras, like this one, an image of the front cover of Kenneth Oppel’s YA Frankenstein prequel, This Dark Endeavor. Point your iOS or Android device at the image below:
Next, we’ll show you how to create your own auras in Aurasma, and talk about how Aurasma’s being used by a science teacher at Harwood Union Middle School, one of our partner schools.
