Createch-ing

I realized I was doing "appsmashing" ( combining two or more apps in one activity) when I went to iPad summit in Boston in November 2013. Until then, I thought it was just playing with apps. But the plain truth is that combining apps to make a project is just a natural process when the goal is the project and not the technology. My students have been creating stories based on a leaf animal. Some chose to write in English, others chose to write it in Spanish. Then they created a digital version of the story using the Puppet Pals app. Their stories were displayed on a bulletin board but I wanted to share those digital stories with parents in the conferences, and here is where Augmented Reality comes to play.    We used Aurasma to create the AR. It was much easier than they thought it would be. The first thing they needed to create was the "overlay" and it was already done: the videos with the stories. They just needed then the trigger image. In this case, ...

Last week I tried using "Aurasma" in the iPads. Aurasma is an augmented reality app that uses a trigger image to show a 3d object, video or whatever you want to appear. My goal was to make a worksheet alive. As we work in a bilingual setting and we teach math in spanish, explanations are very visual but not all the students pick it up at the beginning. Some of them need further explanation, of course , whether it is their mother language or not. But I was thinking about homework and that moment when you are trying to recall an explanation but you do not remember exactly what the teacher said. And here is when the "virtual teacher" in a form of video appears when you put the iPad over the worksheet.  The application could seem very complicated , but in fact, it was easy to deal with since it guides you al l the time. You can create use one aura form the database, but I created my own one. I first did a video using "Doceri" explaining the...