Help students become creators of this engaging new technology
With the astronomical rise in popularity of virtual reality in education, it’s important to make available tools for students to create virtual reality content as well as consuming it. So while you get ready to send your students off on Expeditions to amazing new worlds and experiences, have ways for them to make their own waiting when they return.
Let’s look at a couple ways students can create VR content.
I’m participating in Thinglink’s Summer VR Challenge, and the first exercise in the challenge is to design your Digital Self, a visual representation of yourself with embedded links to things you feel are important people know about you.
A key component of the exercise is to share your Digital Self with your PLN. But I warn you: you’re not ready for this jelly.
An innovative way for students to explore who they are happens in Lori Lisai’s classroom at Lamoille Union Middle School where she works with them to craft an interactive biography through her Geography of Self project.
A bulletin board houses the student self portraits; 8th graders include their 7th grade portraits side-by-side: a visual representation of growth-over-time.
Music City learns a thing or two about Vermont ed tech
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.
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.”
I can’t recommend highly enough Mrs Pepe’s Google Glass Adventures. Courtney Pepe teaches high school in New Jersey, and has spent the last month plus trying out Google Glass in the classroom with her students. Her blogposts. Are. Fascinating. Like this demo of using the translate function with Glass:
But, as the first installment of a new feature I like to call How Hard Is It, Really? I decided to try duplicating one of Mrs Pepe’s adventures. Specifically, the Glass and Literacy adventure. Mrs Pepe writes:
When I was working with a language arts teacher today I had a brainstorm. Google Glass can become part of a new literacy strategy to introduce a new book. The class that I was working with was reading the book The Barcode Tattoo. When I said “okay glass… Google Barcode Tattoo. I got 4 great bits of micro-information about the book 1- date of publication 2-author 3- themes and big ideas 4- sequels/prequels – wow I thought this would be a great strategy to build anticipation and excitement right before students begin reading a new novel.
Aha! So I gave it a shot. I captured the video below using Google’s Glass app for iOS along with Reflector and Camtasia. What you’re seeing is the actual footage that is displayed in your field of vision via Glass.
Initial thoughts on Glass? It’s harder to control than I thought it would be. It’s harder to everything than I thought it would be. Your brain processes the world in a certain way, based on visual input, and it’s a little startling to find new input that follows you around and does certain things (like take photos and share them to Google+) based on the way you move your head. But it gets easier after the first few minutes. The swiping back and forth can get you into trouble (I swiped myself right off of wifi twice) but once you get Glass’ attention (with a firmly voiced “Okay glass:”) it pings cheerfully to let you know it’s awaiting further instructions.
So, kinda.
I reached up to rub my eye and accidentally snapped this photo of my living room. Yes, there are dogs on every surface.
Even though couldn’t find the full range of options Mrs. Pepe describes in the example above, just being able to go out to a website with more information about a book would make browsing in a library or bookstore an entirely different experience. Having instant access to additional information about objects in the world around you is undeniably cool, and as a serious history nerd, if I can hook it up to cool history facts as I’m wandering around Danby, Vermont, wondering about the genesis of their soldier-on-a-plinth monument, I’m basically never taking these things off.
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.
In a nutshell, Aurasma’s augmented reality images are called auras. You make them with Aurasma Studio, which runs in your web browser. An aura consists of two parts:
A trigger image, aka the image viewers will point their device at to trigger the content;
and an overlay, or the hidden content that will be triggered. In Aurasma studio, you lay the content over the image to make an aura.
This is an aura based off the cover of This Dark Endeavor, a prequel to Frankenstein. Point your iOS or Android device at the image below:
Here’s a brief screencast of how to create a simple aura with a video overlay.
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. 🙂
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 the gray A…Then the magnifying glass. Search for “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.
“Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” –Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Okay, so I’m a few months early but oy, this weather, #btv.
Brought to you by AR DinoPark, a free augmented reality app that lets you plunk one solitary triceratops into your real-world location. Such as the Tarrant Institute office.
Unfortunately, that’s all it seems to do. Your triceratops makes a little squeak and does a little dance, then you can read a paragraph of info about him. But there’s no way to create your own content or interact with said triceratops, and you have to pay for additional dinosaurs. But it’s a cool party trick.
The annual Rube Goldberg Challenge is an opportunity for students to engage in their inner creative, design-build personalities. They are tasked with completing a simple task through a complex, convoluted, over the top device that incorporates simple machine physics and creative problem solving. There are limits to their space, time, and materials (nothing banned form school for instance). The machines that are created range from functionally simplistic to extremely clever but all offer students a chance to personalize the experience. The one part of the project that has not been emphasized over the past several years is charging students with explaining their thought process as they develop, test, and redesign their design. The use of several different iPad apps were explored during this project to see how students could benefit from documenting their thinking as they went through a problem solving process.
Half of the student groups used the Explain Everything app to document via video, text, photos their thought process, while the other half used the Aurasma app to do the same. There were some challenges with the Aurasma app because our internet connectivity was poor in the Middle Gym so reaching Aurasma was difficult and the video cannot be edited prior to attaching to an Aura (trigger). The Explain Everything app appears to be better suited for this type of activity; where students could collect their thoughts on different slides or even have multiple videos on one slide.
Students were asked to reflect on the use of their app when the project was complete. Their feedback brings me back to the SAMR model and how it relates to my research question of using technology to enhance meta-cognition In this project, the Aurasma app did not fit the bill very well for allowing students to document their thinking over time. The app and the activity were not well suited; the video cannot be paused and continued, so students were unable to document their thinking over time. The Explain Everything app had both positive and negative reviews from students but with some additional practice with the app, students will be more comfortable with the potential to revisit their prior thoughts and construct new thinking. Ideally, students would have an opportunity to document their process and then be given another similar activity to complete using what they have collected on the Explain Everything app as a guide.
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Brian Wagner teaches 8th grade science at Harwood Union Middle School in Moretown VT. You can reach him on twitter: @swagsci
One of our partner educators, Brian Wagner, teaches eighth grade science at Harwood Union Middle School, in Moretown VT. This past spring, he used Aurasma with his students to bring elements of the periodic table to life in a gallery walk.
The Rube Goldberg Challenge was not a good fit for the Aurasma app as a means of documenting thinking over time, but it proved to be a good tool for students to teach each other about the periodic table.
In essence, students jig-sawed their knowledge about specific sections of the Periodic Table to create a larger perspective about the trends, patterns, and curiosities of table.
Memorizing the elements of the periodic table is a complete waste of time (a personal opinion but one generally recognized as valid).
Understanding the information stored in the table because of the way it is constructed unlocks chemistry at a deeper level. The author Sam Keane in his book The Disappearing Spoon writes that “…at its simplest level, the periodic table catalogs all the different kinds of matter in our universe, the hundred-odd characters whose headstrong personalities give rise to everything we see and touch. The shape of the table also gives scientific clues as to how those personalities mingle with one another in crowds….”
My objective for this activity is for students to begin to recognize the trends and personalities and teach each other about different sections using Augmented Reality. The assignment is presented in the attached file- The Periodic Table Assignment 2013
The students researched as per the assignment criteria and prepared a video presentation of their element group. They were allowed to create the video in whatever manner they wanted- many did not want to be onscreen but talked through their information while writing it out on paper. Some used a chalk board for added effect. Others set it up as a news cast. Each group created a simple Aura (trigger) to activate the video.
The Auras were placed around the middle school Gallery in their respective groups and an iPad was stationed at each of these areas to use for the video presentation. Students rotated throughout the gallery, watching each other’s videos and taking notes about each section. Initially I wanted each student group to prepare an annotated photo of a periodic table with the information they collected. This would act as a summarizing aspect to their learning. Unfortunately there was not enough time to go through the gallery walk and do the Skitch challenge. The following day we lost our Wi-Fi , the iPads were needed for other classes when it returned, and the opportunity was lost.
During the class time with no internet, students took a quick quiz about the periodic table. The quiz was used as a means to discuss their findings further and clear up misconceptions that arose during their research. There will be a follow-up summative quiz (using Socrative) to determine how much information has been internalized. That will be a separate post.
The use of the Aurasma app was received well by students for this activity. They saw the value in researching, outlining, and preparing a presentation that others would learn from.
Because their audience was a little bigger (the entire 8th grade) they took more time to prepare and shoot the video (many with multiple takes to get it right). Their personal creativity was valued and the questions that arose from their research made good conversations that would have been missing from a straight up lecture about the topic.
One of the drawbacks to the app was having to hold the iPad over the Aura while watching the video. However, one student figured out that by double tapping on the video while it was playing would take the video to full screen and allow it continue playing in any position. iMovie would also be a preferred video tool for making the videos more polished.
Unfortunately iMovie is not on our iPads yet, although one student convinced me to download it for him, where he proceeded to take three individual videos his group made into one smooth presentation.
With the astronomical rise in popularity of virtual reality in education, it’s important to make available tools for students to create virtual reality content as well as consuming it. So while you get ready to send your students off on Expeditions to amazing new worlds and experiences, have ways for them to make their own waiting when they return.
I’m participating in 
