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I Was Experiencing Personalized Learning in 1987

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I have been trying to catch up with episodes of George Couros’s excellent Innovator’s Mindset Podcast. Of course, I had to revisit the episode in which I was lucky to appear. While listening to it, I began to realize when I was talking about my favorite teachers. They were actually the ones who allowed me to experience personalized learning.  This is nearly 40 years ago! In 1997, the movie of the year was Beverly Hills Cop 2, and the biggest song of the year was “ Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston.  Specifically, Mr. Vollrath, who I talked about in the episode, realized that it was not the ability to spell a word but to know what it means and use it in the proper context. As I write this post right now, I am still not the best speller, but there are tools that can assist me with it. I see red lines in Google Docs that alert me if I misspelled something. It’s like he understood the WHY of the words, which was not the spelling but the understanding of the words and the abi
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A Place for Augmented Reality in the Classroom

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There were two different components I want students to report out on at the end of their personal learning project.  I want students to be able to provide information as it related to their question or goal.  The other report I wanted was a reflective piece on the process itself.  
I could see this being very doable as a “poster presentation” where students stood by a poster and reported out to a public audience.  I like this idea but wanted to change it up for a couple of reasons.  Due to the tight time frame in which I laid out this project, I wasn’t able to advertise and get enough of a public presence to attend.  Without that audience, I would need to rely on students as the audience.  I wanted all of my student to be able to experience the projects.  So, I decided to find a way to make this poster presentation a little more virtual using augmented reality.
Not familiar with augmented reality?  Take a look at this clip from the film Minority Report and the future of advertising:


Augmented reality is something I was introduced to a couple of year ago at an EdCamp. 
 The specific apps I was introduced to were Chromville and Aurasma.  Chromville is more of an elementary school level app which generated 3D animated images from 2D pieces of paper.


It turns a 2D image like this:
Into a 3D interactive model like this:
There are different uses for the app.  Chromville is more of a general situation app that can be used to help in storytelling and idea development.  
The Chromville Science app is more specific to teaching students elementary science concepts. There are explorations of areas in physical, life, and earth sciences such as
Planet Earth



The Human Body


Laboratory


Another augmented reality app is Aurasma.  It allows users to use a image in the real world as a trigger to overlay a multimedia file.  The example below is of a file, called an Aura, triggered by the back of the $1 bill. Below, you'll see video I captured when viewing a $1 using the Aurasma app on my phone.



So how do you create an Aura? This video starts after you’ve logged into Aurasma.com. There is a little bit of time taken when uploading the overlay in this video clip.


Here's what the aura looks like when I tested it.




So, how will I use this in my classroom as a part of the “poster presentation”?
There are two final components of our personal learning project.  The first is a short video (2 minutes or less) in which students communicate the answer to their research question or how well they were able to meet their personal goal.  The second deliverable is a document communicating the process of the project.  Students will create a physical copy of the process sheet.  It will be the size of a standard piece of printer paper.  This sheet will then be used as a trigger for their video which they will tie as an overlay using Aurasma.  This will allow students to view experience the results of their project while being free to explore other projects at the same time.  It still requires students to use oral communication skills just in a multimedia mode.

Below, you will find the rubrics for the project.  I look forward to sharing the results next week.


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