 Hi, thank you so much for listening to my presentation about augmenting interest in reading with augmented reality. I want to start by thanking the K-12 online conference. I'm so honored to be a part of this presentation and thrilled to be sharing something I'm really excited about with the rest of you. My name is Kyle Dunbar. You can follow me on Twitter at EdTechDunny, and I also have a blog called EdTechDunny, that's at Blogspot. I hope you check me out here if you enjoy this presentation. I wanted to say a little bit more about myself. I'm a technology integration specialist in a middle school in Alexandria, Virginia, which is just outside of Washington, DC, which means I get to work with teachers to use more technology in the classroom. So I love doing workshops with teachers, but I also love being in the classroom with the kids and watching how the technology changes their learning. It's a great job and I'm so lucky to have it. The technology that really fascinates me that I really love pursuing is technology that draws students in in a new way. I love experiences where I walk into a classroom and there's kids that are not engaged or turned off by school, and whatever we're doing with the technology for some reason captures their interest and captures them and draws them back into learning. The school I work in is very diverse. I'm super lucky that way. We have students from all around the world. We have students from all walks of life. We have students with lots of different interests and belief systems. And I'm also very lucky that we have a lot of technology to use in the classroom. It's never enough, but we do have quite a lot and so it makes my job super easy that way. I'm very, very lucky. And then you'll see from the pictures that I'm also a mom and I think that's really relevant to my presentation. It's what I do because watching my kids go through school and watching how they learn at home and what excites them has really sort of changed how I approach education. I wanted to start before I got into the store. I'm going to share with you today with a quote that I think really drives a lot of what I do and a lot of why I think educational technology is a way to transform teaching and learning. And that's this quote. Tech gives the quietest student a voice. I've seen this time and time again, whether it's a discussion board or a blog or it's digital storytelling or it's coding in the classroom or gaming in the classroom. Oftentimes those kids that come to school every day and sit there quietly and aren't really heard. Use technology as a way to get their ideas out there and I think it's such an important thing to keep in mind when we're planning lessons, when we're planning what kind of technology we want to use. So my presentation is mostly about an app called Erasmah, which is augmented reality app. It's available both on iPads and on the Android platform and you can use most of it free, which is totally amazing and powerful. Basically what it does is it allows you to link videos or websites to images. So it works much like a QR code, except it's visually based. So instead of scanning image of black and white dots and squares, you have a picture of something, something a kid has drawn, a cover of a book, a $20 bill, which I'm going to show you in a second. And when you hover over those images with your device, your tablet or your phone, it's almost like that image is coming alive, especially depending on how you've planned your video or your website. So you can create your own Erasmah either through the app or through the website, which is studio.erasmah.com. But you can also just use the app by scanning things that other people have created with your phone or your tablet. So what I want to do next is show you a little bit about how one of those works. Okay, so to get a sense of how Erasmah works, I wanted to show you one of the trigger images that anybody can use. It's available on their public channels and it's up a $20 bill. So if you open Erasmah and then you find the $20 bill in the lens of the camera, Erasmah finds the trigger image and then activates the augmented reality. So that as you're looking at the $20 bill through the iPad, it now looks as if it's coming alive and moving. This is a great example of how augmented reality can take a still image and make it dynamic and more interesting and in some cases informative. So I think that's really cool that $20 bill is almost always what I show teachers to get them really excited about how Erasmah works. But I want to tell you how a teacher used it in the classroom because that's even more exciting. And I want to credit the teacher that I worked with, Laura Davis, sixth grade English language arts teacher at my school, who had this idea that when students independently read for her class, it's often hard to kind of assess if they've read it and to get them excited about the process. So her idea was that she would use book covers as the triggers. So kids brought in the copy of the book that they were working on. And in addition to that, they were to write a 30 second advertisement for their book. And she did all the work in terms of like assigning this and getting them excited for it and setting expectations for what their commercials should sound like. In addition, what she did, which I thought was brilliant was she had the kids practice reading within 30 seconds in class. So she would set a timer and kids would just kind of read their advertisement to themselves and make sure they could finish in those 30 seconds. Then what we did was I kind of came in with the iPads and, you know, show the students a little bit about how the app worked, so they didn't need much instruction. And I did have printed instructions also. And I try to always do that when I work with kids for the kids that need printed and then also for follow-up with the teacher, so that if I'm not there and you have kids that are absent and the teacher wants to be able to support or if there's a co-teacher in the class that they also have instructions there to help the kids do it. And if you go to my blog, I have a copy of those instructions there that you can have access to. So the students were paired up and one student did the recording and the other student read about their advertisement. So what I thought would be fun to do next is to see one of them and see how they came out. Okay, so now I want to give you a sense of how our Erasmus works that we created in school. So similar to the Erasmus that you saw the $20 bill, you're going to open the Erasmus app and then you're going to hover over the trigger image. In this case, the cover of the book that the students read. Sometimes it takes a little while for the image to be found. And then you're brought to the video the student created advertising her book. I hope you enjoyed seeing that. I know that student really enjoyed making that Erasma and it came out really cute and it was fun to hear what she had to say about that great book. And so I wanted next to talk a little bit about why you should do this, why Erasma is a great tool for promoting independent reading. And I'll start by saying just it feels like magic. I think whenever I show teachers the $20 bill or I show them videos like this that students have made, there is just an element of how on earth is that happening and how much fun it is to see that. And I think it's fair to say that when we experience magic in school, it's memorable. It's exciting. It's engaging. And it gives us those good feelings that help us learn better and help us be more comfortable with what we're learning. I think this method also is exciting because it gets kids talking. A normal way to assess independent reading is to maybe have each kid get up and give a book talk in front of the class. And that's really hard for some kids to do. It takes a lot of time for each kid to present their book. Only one kid is talking at a time. Everyone else is listening. Or maybe the teachers independently interviewing kids while everyone else is working in an assignment. Well then, you're only hearing from one kid. Other kids aren't hearing about the books each other have read. Whereas with Erasma, you get all the kids that practice with their oral language. They're all practicing giving a little speech about their book, but they can all sort of do it at once and they all have a chance to listen to each other's. So I really think the more in school we get to give opportunities for all students to speak and to contribute, the more kids see the value in their learning and feel connected to each other. This is also a great way to help with book choice. Something we know about struggling readers is that they have a hard time picking books. They don't know where to start. They're not always sure what they like or what they should read next. And you could see with Erasma, if you continue to have kids record these every time they read different independent books, eventually your whole classroom library or your whole school library or your whole public library could have Erasmas available where kids could scan them and find out what other kids think about these books. It would be a great way to help students choose their next book and to hear from their peers why they should read different books. And we love having kids advertise books. So this is a great way to promote that also. And finally, it really unleashes creativity. I think that this is so much fun when we did the first one to see all the different books kids read, the different ways they advertised it, and the different things they pulled in. Even the ways they figured out how to record. You can see the girls over there getting up on their chair to make it work out right or how they figured out where to hold their script so that their video was compelling. So all those problem-solving and creative solutions that they had to do. And then also the next time the teacher did the project, she had the kids draw their own pictures. So instead of independent reading, this was a common novel that the whole classroom read, and they all had to use visualization to draw an image from the book. And so all the pictures were different in the classroom. All the kids' descriptions of what they had drawn, of course, were different. And so it was really wonderful to see that creativity come out in students. We know that that's such an important skill for students to build and sometimes with pressure of standardized testing, we don't offer them opportunities to show that there's many different ways to interpret books and many different ways to share what they know. So Erasmus is an excellent tool for developing that. But that's not about what I think. I think it would be fun to hear a little bit from some students and from the teacher about why Erasmus is a great tool to use in the classroom. I liked Erasmus because it was an easy way to do a very complex thing. You could easily just get an iPad and you could do tape, a commercial for a book which could have been done in a much harder way and an essay or something. And it also gave us a way to use technology and it was also really fun to do. And it made students interested in actually learning about their book and doing something with it. What was hard and challenging about the app was that you had to follow the directions very carefully. If you messed up something at the beginning, then you had to go back and start over like I did. So you don't have to pay attention to what the teacher tells you to do and then make sure you do it. That a teacher should also do this because it's a very complex thing that kids can do very easily and they can have fun doing it instead of like lagging through it and like hating it. Gives them a way to, you know, kind of like learn about their book a little more and really enjoy the project. The reason why I used Erasmus for this project was our kids have been reading a lot of independent reading books and they wanted to share what they've learned and the books they've read with each other. Erasmus offered a really great opportunity for the kids to create their own commercial, to advertise the book and why they liked it so much and then record it and link it to the image of the cover of the book. The kids loved doing the project and they loved watching each other's videos and I think it really helped them pick new books that they would enjoy. So I think they said great and that student I think really said it very clearly that Erasmus is a lot of fun, it's engaging, it's a great way to show what you've learned. It's a great way to learn about troubleshooting and following directions and it's something he'd like to see more teachers use so I think that's really neat to hear. Keeping all of that in mind I thought it would be useful to share a little bit of some tips and tricks that we sort of learned along the way as we were using Erasmus in the classroom. One of the things we struggled with sometimes was the images that we had chosen. So for instance a cover of a book, if it has the library binding on it you might get some glare so you have to try some different spaces in the classroom maybe away from the fluorescent lights or from natural light coming in through the windows to make sure that glare is not there. Also when the students drew their images it was pretty important that the colors were vibrant and clear and not just pencil drawn things. Erasmus had a hard time remembering those images and using them as sugar images so that's something you can tell students ahead of time to make sure that they're creating images that you can use well. I also found just using different lights and using different backgrounds also made a difference so if the student had already drawn something and we were having trouble getting it to become a sugar image sometimes I would take it in a different space and then it would work better so that's one thing that's really important to think about. We were using iPads and we found that sometimes the volume even though it looked like it was on wasn't working properly in a RASM we had to go back out and check the volume and then go back in again so that's something to sort of be on the watch for. In terms of recommended practices I would definitely have extra hands on deck the first time we were trying it so we had classroom teacher and myself and that was great and then what started to happen was certain kids started to become experts in circulating and helping the other students so whether it's someone with a job like mine as a technology integration specialist your media specialist a co-teacher, a parent it's always helpful to the first time you're doing this to have someone else around that can kind of help manage the students and help troubleshoot a bit. Also, I think as I mentioned earlier this teacher was brilliant because she really had the kids practice before they even touched the technology and that was really helpful for the students in there and so it made the recording go much faster and move through things much more quickly so I would definitely recommend that. Something we struggled with and you probably noticed in the quality of the app that I shared with you is that it's really great if you can have some kind of private recording space because the microphones on the devices really do pick up a lot of background noise and so if you want to be able to hear the student clearly it's really nice if they can record in spaces I think the next time we did this we spread kids out in the hallway and that helped a lot as long as there's no hallway noise and I've seen other teachers that use the old study carols that we used to use to help kids create privacy to also use to have sort of private recording spaces it helps too to have signs that say recording in progress or things like that that you can hang on your door or you can put up in the room so that other kids remember to use their whisper voices. I also recommend, as I said earlier, having directions on hand it really helps the students do their own troubleshooting as well so that if they're stuck somewhere I can kind of point out on the directions where they are and what they need to do next and it helps them get a little more comfortable with how it works. On the other hand, I also really like to encourage students to figure things out on their own and to kind of say well where do you think on the app you should click next and what do you think you should try next to be able to do it with directions you want them to also be able to troubleshoot and I think we all know that technology and updates and new versions are coming out so quickly that sometimes directions are, you know, different the minute we finish writing them because the app has been updated in some way but I do recommend them at least for the first couple of times that you have them to fall back on and to support any other adults that are helping you. Finally, Erasm, in addition to the app you can also create an account for their website which is called studio.arasmod.com and that just gives you a little more control, a little more management in terms of what you can create and how you can use trigger images and things like that. So if you think you'll be using this a lot for a ton of different kinds of projects I would recommend requesting an account there which again is free and something that you can just give yourself some time. I think it takes them a few days to approve your account. So those are some tips and tricks that I recommend in terms of using Erasm. So what I'd like to finish with is talking a little bit about where we want to go from here. So the first thing we want to do is make more. Let more students try out this way of sharing things that they've read and have more teachers try it out and use more books so that we can have more experience and we can really expand on what we've done here. We'd also like to figure out a way for students' view. So Laura did let students in other classes watch each others so that within her class all of her kids saw many, many, many of them but I would love to see other 6th grade teachers see the ones that her kids made and maybe post things in the library and share them with parents and share them with kids in other grade levels and maybe elementary schools to work out some systems so that more students can see these great augmented reality videos that the kids have made. I also think it would be really interesting to do a little bit of action research on this and to really track whether using these results in an increase of independent reading completion. So does it help students find books that they want to read? Does it motivate kids to finish that independent reading so that they can make the book trailer and to see if it's really having an impact there the way we think it is? And then finally I think there's lots of room to use Erasm for other literacy skills that we want to develop with students whether it's summarizing nonfiction articles, predicting when they're reading a long novel, understanding characters in books or visualizing as they read. So in addition to this book commercial type of idea we'd also like to see how it would help students develop other literacy skills. Well, so that concludes my main presentation but I do hope that we continue this conversation. Please follow me on Twitter so that we can keep up to date with other developments in digital literacy and digital storytelling and please feel free to follow my blog which is called Learning with Meeting at attech.ni.blogspot.com and again I want to thank the K-12 online conference organizers for inviting me to participate in this year's conference and for all the work they're doing behind the scenes to make this open way of learning accessible to so many of us. So thank you very much and see you online.