Aurasma is an augmented reality application that is really cool. According to Wikipedia, "Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented bycomputer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data." An that is what this does.
I began the lesson by exploring the world within the app "Epic Citadel." This app allows the children to explore a beautifully created, mid-evil world complete with flags, fruit market, stores, castle, and temple but without any other person in sight. Children are free to explore the land and develop their own story line about what may have happened to all of the citizens of this world. After exploring the app for awhile, children worked together to develop a list of "power words" to describe the castle, or parts of the castle. The words were then turned into a word cloud using the website abcya.
The children then used these words, and their experience within Epic Citadel to write a paragraph about Epic Citadel introducing the setting of the castle. Next came the really cool part.
The children used the app Pinnacle to create a short movie of screen captures from the game as the backdrop to their paragraph. Then using Aurasma, the children used the movie as an overlay and their word clouds as a trigger image. Children were thrilled to see their movies miraculously appear when they scanned their clouds with the iPads.
I've included one of the students' videos below, but if you'd like to try this out for yourself, you can find the students' word clouds here. Print them out, and then follow the directions beneath the video to make it work.
- Download the app “Aurasma” onto your Smartphone.
- Open the app and press the A at the bottom of the screen.
- Click on the search option.
- Type in "kozy1" and click the option.
- Click on "Epic Citadel."
- Press "Follow.
- Open the app and scan the word cloud
- Watch and enjoy.
I'd like to thank this blog for the great idea.
