2 Guys Visit South Berwyn

The students and staff of +South Berwyn 100 will benefit greatly from having +Drew Minock and +Brad Waid come and train us on the use of +DAQRI Education 4D Studio. 4D Studio is an augmented reality platform that is far superior to those that are out there. I think it is better than Layer and Aurasma both!

Drew and Brad arrived in Berwyn on Thursday morning. We toured 1 elementary school and 1 middle school. We are well known for our site visits. +South Berwyn 100  has hosted over 600 people from 10 states over the last 3 years. They come to see our 1:1 program in action. Seeing is believing. We saw an iPad classroom, robotics club, Makey Makey, 6th grade language arts and math Macbook classes. Next we went to a planning meeting for our +iEngage Berwyn 2 day Ed Tech conference on May 8-9, 2015. It was great to have input from Brad and Drew. They have been to many national conferences. Brad and Drew along with +Kevin Honeycutt and JohnAntonetti will be featured at the conference. Brad's and Drew's input was invaluable. After that +Shannon Soger and I did the 2 Guys Show live with Brad and Drew. 

During the show we talked about what it takes to have an effective 1:1 program, the power of social media and planning an ed tech conference.  It was so much fun to talk about 2 of my favorite things, social media and the great things we are doing in our district. I love my job! It was so much fun doing the show. I hope you can find some time to watch it. 

On Friday Brad and Drew trained our staff on DAQRI 4D Studio augmented reality platform. Teachers were given release time to attend a half day session to learn how to use 4D Studio and begin to create triggers. We were able to work in our new district professional development room. It is an awesome space for teaching and learning. The first step was to have the team members apply for a free 4D Studio edu license.  Brad and Drew demonstrated many of the pre-made DAQRI products,  Anatomy 4D, Enchantium and Elements 4D. They had us hooked. We saw the power that augmented reality could have in our classrooms. Augmented reality is fun and it brings things into the classroom that we could not bring in on our own. Similar to the way Skype or Google Hangouts bring experts into your classroom. Elements 4D enables the user to interact with 36 naturally occurring elements. The user can see what chemicals like, mercury, look like on their own, or what the chemical reaction would be if any of the elements were combined. Using the app is sure to bring oohh's and aahh's to any classroom! Next we dove into 4D Studio. Drew and Brad showed us how to use all the bells and whistles that go with 4D Studio. You can find 4D video tutorials here. The best part was that teachers were given time to play and build triggers to use in their classrooms before they left. Teachers are working now to create projects with their students. Primarily lower elementary teachers are creating experiences for their students to use in class on the iOS devices and upper elementary and middle school teachers are having their students create their own experiences to share with classmates. We hope to have some triggers ready to publish soon. 

It was a great experience for everyone involved and we look forward to the return of Brad and Drew so that we can show them what teachers and students in our district have created. 

Augmented Reality

It was another great week in the same 4th grade classroom. I have to admit that 4th grade is my favorite grade. I was a 4th grade teacher for 7 years before becoming the computer teacher. This week we used augmented reality to create videos that went along with biographical 5 paragraph essays that the children had already created. We covered quite a few CCSS ELA standards with this project.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.7
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.4.2a-e
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.4.5
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.5

Before I came the children read biographies about famous Americans. The classroom teacher had them write 5 paragraph essays, and find a picture of the person they read about. The pictures and essays were hung up in the classroom and out in the hallway.
Next we had to create the video or the overlay. The picture above shows me recording a student who is speaking in 1st person as the person he read about. A few of the students chose to dress up like the person they read about, but it was not required. Some of the students got into it by being really expressive, some even changed their voice. It was great to see them act.
Once everyone was recorded we used the Aurasma app for iPad (there is also an app available for Android devices) to create our auras.  I have an iPad 4, but the classroom iPads are iPad 2s. Originally, I was thinking that I could Airdrop (a new feature in iOS 7) the videos to the student iPads from my iPad. I quickly realized that Airdrop is only available for iPad 4s that have iOS 7. Earlier versions of the iPad do not support Airdrop even if they have iOS 7. Each student used my iPad to create their project. Work flow continues to be an issue on iPads. I think that iOS 7 and Airdrop are a huge improvement, but not all schools are always going to have the latest and greatest.
Next as a whole group we created accounts using student email address. I read the privacy policy and the terms of use policy. This site has no age restrictions. Our student email address reveal no private information about students.
The app is very intuitive. The first thing to do is to find an overlay. An overlay can be a 3-D object or video. In our case it was the videos that the students created. We uploaded the video from the camera roll. Then you take a picture of your trigger. Our trigger is the picture that students printed out and hung up with their essay. There are some size restrictions on the trigger. Next you join them together. Finally, you create a channel, so that other people can search for and like your channel. There is an option to make the auras public or private. I had the children create a channel and make their auras public. We are going to share these with parents on the night of open house, so I want the content to be available to everyone. You can search for someones channel and like it. Once you like it then the trigger image will bring up the aura or overlay video on your device. If you mark the video private then only the creator will be able to view it on the device used to create the project. Below is a screen shot of the essay, the trigger, and the overlay video or aura. Aurasma has a You Tube channel and one video in particular that tells about the app upgrades made recently.
The students liked creating the auras and watching themselves star in the video. The students don't seem as impressed as the adults by this new technology.
The classroom has 3 iPad 2s. Next time I would rotate the iPads that I used for recording, so I that I could have the students make their auras in groups of 3 instead of one at at time.