Writing, Tour Wrist, Puppet Pal and Screenshots.

Some people might argue that what you will read here is not Augmented Reality. But for me it is. This form of AR is using an app to its full effectiveness to integrate it's images into other apps. 

What I am explaining here is how I have used the fantastic 360 Panorama images from an app called Tour Wrist to engage my students to write, improve their descriptive language and enhance their skills in persuasive writing. 

What the students have done in a creative way is used images from this app to build narrative stories, creative comics or animations. This is a perfect example of the iPad allowing students to be creative by crossing over and blending various apps together to produce quality and creative work. 

Image from Tour Wrist

What I discovered was that students were taking screenshots of places of interest in Tour Wrist . These images were then placed into Book Creator, Strip Design and even in Puppet Pal as a background images.

The LOTE teachers have used Tour Wrist to allow students to describe places in China or France. From here they have created movies in Puppet Pals using the language of choice. 

One of my students wrote a fantastic book from his version of Alcatraz. Taking screenshots from the many angles in Tour Wrist.

Puppet Pals was used to create debates and persuasive text through the places of interest from around the world. The students worked in pairs and creating animations in Puppet Pal arguing which place was the better tourist destination. (Las Vegas or Paris) 

Debate using Tour Wrist Images

Debate using Tour Wrist Images

Tour Wrist mirrors through Reflection or AppleTV and looks amazing. The appearance and manipulation of this App through an iPad is spectacular. Explore the many options that are available in using Tour Wrist through writing, oral language and animation. 

Measuring Angles and Augmented Reality....FUN!

This week I had a very different numeracy lesson with my Year 5's. We used Augmented Reality to measure and create angles and converting distances from feet to metres. We used an Augmented Reality App called MathsMovesUSkiJumper, taken from the MathsMovesU website. This app is a lot of fun. You will need to go to MathsMovesU to print out the PDF trigger that allows the ski ramp to appear before your eyes.

The purpose behind this lesson was to measure angles, conversion, graphing and collaboration. You will need to activate the App, point the camera at the trigger. This will allow the students to use the two levers on the iPad screen to angle the ramp and release the skier. The skier will land and the app will give you a measurement in feet of how far the skier jumped. 

The Learning Intentions for my students was to ensure they took a screen shot of each jump, find an app or website to convert feet to metres and form angles from screen shot to measure the best jump  and angle.

Using the MathMovesU PDF
Leavers to angle the ramp, measurement recorded in top left corner.

As a result of all this 'Open Ended Numeracy and problem solving', there seemed to be a very blended approach to using a variety of iPad Apps to complete the task. The students were required to present their work as graphs, representing the ski jump attempts completed. The graph was to represent the angle and distance jumped. They also presented the work in Keynote or another app as the final task. 

Some of my students took this a little further and created an Aurasma Augmented experience and filmed a short reflection depicting the session and findings.

The students took screen shots of the ramp and jump. Once the distance was calculated the students needed to convert the feet to metres and measure the angle. The conversion was mainly completed on a website converter. The measuring of the ramp angles was completed using A++ Measuring App. This gave a 'near enough' angle measurement. Refer to images below. 

A++ Measuring App
iPhone App that is free

Red line is the angle draw on image.

This session was very engaging and placed the enforces on angles and measurement conversion in a hands on approach through augmented reality. The students produced angles using a ski jump, which meant a result needed to be achieved in sending a skier down the ramp. There is also a bridge making App linked to this site/app.

Not only did the students love this activity, I enjoyed it too. Good luck and let me know how you go with your ski jump numeracy lessons.