Week 4 - Augmented Reality + Innovation

It was another great session in the Mind Lab for our fourth week, however I feel I need to briefly reflect on the first two assessments of the course which are now (thank god!) finished and submitted! These took up most of my headspace last week and as due dates loom close it is difficult to balance keeping up with weekly coursework. I've enjoyed the last couple of days being able to just relax and absorb information again!

But even though it was a bit of a struggle getting myself into essay writing mode again, I actually really enjoyed the thought process behind our first two assessments. One of the big attractions of this course in the first place was the fact that it would be applicable to our every day teaching, and sure enough our first task was to solve a problem in our own practice. I chose to try and extend some advanced mathematicians in my group with a Weebly site they can work on independently. I've been working on getting it up and running and am very excited as tomorrow I plan to introduce them to it for the first time. It is the sort of thing that it is difficult to find time for ordinarily, so to be 'forced' to do it through my study has been a great bonus. I'll report back on how it goes!

Anywhow, back to the Mind Lab. Our practical focus this week was AR or Augmented Reality. I have only ever dabbled in this very briefly so I was excited to learn more about it. Aurasma was the primary app we played with, which involves setting up a 'trigger image' which you point your device at, and it will open up whatever you choose - a website, movie, image etc. The possibilities for this are of course endless, and I feel I need to devote a bit of time to getting my head around great ways to use it in the classroom. I found this video useful to get some thoughts going:

Another app we mentioned but didn't get a lot of time to play with was Quiver. This one involves kids' own colouring coming to life and I think it would be especially fun for younger kids so I'm definitely keen to have more of a play. Check it out:

My immediate thoughts and reflections around AR are that it could be a fantastic way to introduce more student voice and ownership into the learning space. Especially having little kids who can't all read and write - if instead they could get information about something in the room by having one of their classmates pop up and tell them about it... well it could be extremely valuable. Another great idea someone mentioned was using it for showing people around the school. I'm working this year with another teacher on our Transition to School processes and we have introduced tours for our little New Entrants on their first visit...how cool if they could take a device around and find out little tidbits along the way!

It is incredibly exciting learning about these new tools and ideas every week, but it can be a little overwhelming as well. I think it will be a matter of just picking one thing at a time to focus on, and choose small goals that can be implemented straight away. A little bit of AR around the wall displays could be a nice next step though!

After our practical part of the session we got stuck into a discussion about innovation.

We spoke about the idea that previously, people relied on the generation before for information and knowledge. However now we are entering completely new territory, and it is the kids that are teaching us. We also discussed how the lines were getting more and more blurred between offline and online, and that it would get to the point where kids won't see those boundaries. There has always been innovation, however now the possibilities are so huge it is quite mind boggling! We can have absolutely no concept of what could be around the corner. On that note, that's it for this week!