This was the first activity that I carried out with mobile devices.
Throughout this year, due to my role as Media Centre Specialist during the morning shift, I had to be in charge of the Webpage POD for J5&6. During the first half of the year, my group consisted of 16 students from J5 A&B. Taking into account this small and controlled learning environment, I felt like this would be a good opportunity to try working with mobile devices. First, I carried out a survey using a lino.it mural asking the children which mobile devices they owned. Most of them had tablets, either iPads or with Android O.S., so I decided to start thinking of an activity based on those resources. I considered that, in order not to waste precious lesson time solving possible Internet problems, I would look for an application that did not need access to the Internet, so I chose Aurasma. Cecilia Nardini had already showed us how this augmented reality app worked in a Learning Centre last year. I took into account the age of my students and the possibility that parents did not trust them with passwords to the app stores yet, so I also asked them to download that application at home. For the first lesson, I decided to only ask five students to bring their tablets, and the rest would continue working with a different activity on the netbooks provided by the school. Since it was the first time that the school would implement the BYOD dynamic, Ceci Nardini drafted a note explaining to the parents how we would work and requiring their authorization to let their children bring their mobile devices to school, together with the name of the apps to be downloaded. I made it clear that they would only use the tablets if they brought that authorization. The chosen students were really excited and brought the slips of paper as soon as possible. I had to provide them with the wifi password but I did not mention it to them, I just entered it into their devices. The first lesson was not very organized since I had to explain two completely different activities to the kids who had brought the tablets and those who had not. They were all very anxious so they did not manage to make good use of their time. For the second lesson, I decided to ask all the students to bring their tablets so I could explain the Aurasma activity at ease and provide help. I showed how the application worked with my own tablet and asked them to do a free trial with their tablets, uploading their own content. They basically had to take pictures of objects that surrounded them and place graphics or animations on top of them, as everytime they pointed at these objects, this new "augmented reality" would pop up. As the kids carried out the activity, they taught me things about the application that I had not discovered yet and helped each other when facing difficulties. This activity was a clear example of how kids could explore augmented reality and create their own representations of reality. They were also autonomous users of ICT and could be creative and innovative as well as cooperative. |