20 Ways to Ue Augmented Reality

The Article

Second Life:

 Second Life proved an incredibly valuable tool for educators hoping to reach a broad audience — or offering even more ways to learn for their own bands of students.

Augmented Reality Development Lab:
Affiliated with  Google, Microsoft, and Logitech, the Augmented Reality Development Lab run by Digital Tech Frontier seeks to draw up projects that entertain as well as educate. The very core goal of the ARDL  involves creating interactive, three-dimensional objects for studying purposes.

Reliving the Revolution:
Karen Schrier harnessed GPS and Pocket PCs to bring the Battle of Lexington to her students through the Reliving the Revolution game, an AR experiment exploring some of the mysteries still shrouding the event — like who shot first! Players assume different historical roles and walk through everything on a real-life map of the Massachusetts city.

PhysicsPlayground:
One of the many, many engines behind PC games received a second life as an engaging strategy for illustrating the intricate ins and outs of physics, in a project known as PhysicsPlayground. It offers up an immersive, three-dimensional environment for experimenting, offering up a safer, more diverse space to better understand how the universe drives itself.

MITAR Games:
Developed by MIT’s Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade, MITAR Games blend real-life locations with virtual individuals and scenarios for an educational experience that research proves entirely valid. Environmental Detectives, its first offering, sends users off on a mystery to discover the source of a devastating toxic spill.

New Horizon:
As a smartphone app, it takes advantage of built-in cameras to present animated character conversations when aligned with certain sections of pages.

Occupational Safety Scaffolding:
Professor Ron Dotson’s Construction Safety students receive a thorough education in establishing safe scaffolding space through three-dimensional demonstrations incorporating the real and the digital alike. A simple application of AR, to be certain, but one undoubtedly possessing the potential to save lives and limbs alike.

FETCH! Lunch Rush:
Education-conscious parents who want L’il Muffin and Junior to learn outside the classroom might want to consider downloading PBS Kids’ intriguing iPhone and iPod Touch app. Keep them entertained in the car or on the couch with a fun little game for ages six through eight meant to help them build basic math skills visually.

Field trips:
Augmented reality museums guide students and self-learners of all ages through interactive digital media centered around a specific theme — maybe even challenge them to play games along the way. HistoriQuest, for example, started life as the Civil War Augmented Reality Project and presented a heady blend of mystery gaming and very real stories.

School in the Park Augmented Reality Experience:
Third graders participating in the 12-year-old School in the Park program engage with AR via smartphones as they explore Balboa Park, the San Diego History Center, and the world-class San Diego Zoo. Not only do they receive exposure to numerous educational digital media resources, teachers also train them in creating their very own augmented reality experiences!

QR Code scavenger hunts:
Smartphones equipped with a QR code reader make for optimal tools when sending students on scavenger hunts across the classroom or school. The Daring Librarian, Gwyneth Anne Bronwynn, sends kids on an augmented reality, animated voyage through the library to figure out where to find everything and whom to ask for assistance.

Mentira:
Mentira takes place in Albuquerque and fuses fact and fiction, fantasy characters and real people, for the world’s first AR Spanish language learning game. It intentionally mimics the structure of a historical murder mystery novel and allows for far deeper, more effective engagement with native speakers than many classroom lessons.

Driver’s ed:
Toyota teamed up with Saatchi & Saatchi to deliver the world’s cleanest and safest test-drive via augmented reality. While the method has yet to catch on in the majority of driver’s education classes, it definitely makes for an impressive, effective alternative to keeping and maintaining a fleet of cars.

Geotagging:
Classrooms with smartphone access blend Google Earth and web albums such as Picasa or Instagram for a firsthand experience in geotagging and receiving a visual education about the world around them. More collaborative classrooms — like those hked together with Skype or another VOIP client – could use this as a way to nurture cross-cultural, geopolitical understanding.

Dow Day:
Jim Mathews’ augmented reality documentary and smartphone app brought University of Madison-Wisconsin students, faculty, staff, and visitors to the year 1967. As they traveled campus, participants’ smartphones called up actual footage of Vietnam War protests corresponding with their current locations.

SciMorph:
Using a webcam and printed target, young kids in need of some science (although, really, everyone is in need of some science) interact with the cute critter SciMorph, who teaches them about gravity, sound, and microbial structures. Each lesson involves exploring a specific zone within the game and opens users up to questions, quizzes, and talks.

Imaginary Worlds:
With PSPs in hand, Mansel Primary School students embarked on an artistic voyage, where downloaded images and QR codes merge and provide challenges to draw up personalized environments. The journey also pits them against monsters and requires a final write-up about how the immersive experience left an educational impact.

Sky Map and Star Walk:
Available on Android and iWhatever devices, these deceptively simple applications pack a megaton punch of education via an innovative augmented reality approach. Both involve pointing the gadget to the sky and seeing the names of the currently visible stars, planets, and constellations pop up, along with additional astronomical information.

Handheld Augmented Reality Project:
Harvard, MIT, and University of Wisconsin at Madison teamed up with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education and nurtured science and math skills to junior high kids using GPS navigators and Dell Axims. Moving through the school meant moving through a synched virtual environment, with each area presenting new challenges they must tackle before pressing forward.

Project Glass:
One of the most ambitious augmented reality initiatives comes straight from Google, who believes its Project Glass holds potential far beyond the classroom. Notoriously, it requires a pair of glasses versus the usual smartphones and laptops, and current experiments involve placing users in first-person extreme athletic experiences, snapping photos, and more.

Threshold Concepts Rebecca Tushingham

Threshold Concepts


‘A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally)’
Meyer and Land, Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines, 2005

‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: implications of course design and evaluation’ provided me with the detail that I need which I have slimmed down into a summary for my own learning and maybe yours:

Jewels in the curriculum

The importance of engagement

Listening for understanding

Reconstitution of self

Tolerating uncertainty

Recursiveness and excursiveness

Unintended consequences of generic ‘good pedagogy’

Good table in article for planning concepts.

Digital Technology

MOE- Digital Technologies. What the Research Tells Us.

Page of useful NZ MOE links etc and summary of ongoing work int he digital technology field.

There is, a growing body of evidence to support the view that digital technologies have the potential to improve student outcomes and to enrich, if not transform, the learning experience of children. This report makes links to research demonstrating the increasing evidence of the positive impact of digital technologies in areas such as motivation, engagement, efficacy, and interaction.
Author: Ministry of Education
Published: July 2012

Research Informed Teaching of Adults

Research Informed Teaching of Adults

This has some really good points in it- especially about the mis-match between a teachers professed philosophy and ideology and their actions in a classroom.

The Collaborative Classroom

What is the Collaborative Classroom?

Characteristics of a Collaborative Classroom

Collaborative classrooms seem to have four general characteristics. The first two capture changing relationships between teachers and students. The third characterizes teachers' new approaches to instruction. The fourth addresses the composition of a collaborative classroom.

1. Shared knowledge among teachers and students

2. Shared authority among teachers and students

3. Teachers as mediators

4. Heterogeneous groupings of students

Challenges and Conflicts

• Classroom Control 
• Preparation Time for Collaborative Learning 
• Individual Differences Among Students 
• Individual Responsibility for Learning 
• Conflict of Values 

Leading in a Complex World Chapter 1

1 LEADING THE POSSIBLE

Leadership by its very definition is about taking people and ideas to new places.

This is the rise of VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

organizations are also more complex because there is much more information available and things are much more interconnected.

What we don’t notice is that because we are using the past as a kind of measure of what’s likely, we have sharply constrained the set of possibilities when we made our decisions.

Complexity is about getting our heads around what is possible (because anything could happen) rather than what is probably going to happen (which is determined from what has happened before).

this task of leading in times as complex and volatile as today is a bigger stretch for us humans than anything else we’ve ever had to do.

there is a way to grow more able to handle the complexity in the world around us: three habits of mind that stretch your thinking capacity and help you grow more “complexity of mind.

These habits of mind are deceptively simple: • Asking different questions • Taking multiple perspectives • Seeing systems

the thing leaders do is answer: they craft a vision, get others to follow them, make decisions purportedly at the drop of a hat.

Stereotypical leaders have vision, charisma, and brilliant minds. They also tend to be male and, oddly, tall.

One leadership skill that you might not even see as a leadership skill at all is the power of asking different questions, which pulls against the stereotype of leaders having all the answers.

most of us ask questions to confirm our hypotheses, not out of any deep curiosity or doubt.

In a time of complexity and uncertainty, though, this pattern is unhelpful. You don’t know which data might be more important or where the novel solution to an emerging issue might be hiding. Your old patterns constrain you, and your old questions keep you in familiar territory. It is new and different questions that open up

new and different possibilities.

figure out what you really don’t know and to ask those questions.

Trying to figure out what questions you’re asking and making an intentional shift to different questions opens up new avenues for exploration in an uncertain and volatile world.

Your mindset determines your behavior, determines what is or is not possible in a given situation, including what questions you think to ask.

Narrowing to decide is key for someone who needs to take action quickly.

It’s not very good for coming up with innovative solutions to complex problems.

Although, as leaders, we often use threats and stresses as powerful prompts to action, there is a cost in this: it is much harder to learn when you’re faced with threat.

FIGURE 1.1

shift your mindset and your mindset can shift your questions.

Leadership is about gathering people together—even people with quite different goals and understandings—and helping them build bridges that take everyone to a new place.

Understanding other people’s perspectives is a central tool in bridge building, because until you know how others see the world, you’ll have little opportunity to influence or learn from their perspective.

If you think about an issue with which you’re struggling, you can imagine for a minute the variety of people and perspectives involved.

You could probably map them together, watching for the ways the players intersect with one another, the way they hold or give away power or information, the way they seem to cluster around a variety of different primary interests.

Taking into account multiple perspectives simply involves remembering that whatever other people do, they tend to do it because they think it’s the right thing.

taking multiple perspectives also helps widen your scope to improve your problem solving.

When the way is not simple and predictable, one of the core requirements of those in power is likely to be to cede some of the control to others and let the system itself begin to come into a new pattern, guided but not controlled by those in power.

In a complex world, as we’ll explore together, it takes a collective sharing of power, creativity, and perspectives to become agile and nuanced enough to lead into the uncertain future.

As you try to ask different questions to grow your curiosity, take multiple perspectives without losing your own, and influence the system even though you’ll never be able to see the whole thing, you are always trying to keep your head above the paradoxical waters of leadership.

The main gist is that we are thinking for a new and complex time with old habits- especially leading with tendency to quick assessments and making multiple decisions. Take time to ask different kinds of questions and consider things from multiple perspectives to come up with truly innovative solutions to complex problems.

Definitely going to try to ask some different questions- especially when you get into time pressured situation you just tend to make decisions based on your experience and  this must be hampering innovative thinking at times.

21st Century Learning Design Rubrics

Microsoft Education Partners Report