Enhancing our images with Augmented Reality

We are now in the final stages of our project...

After having worked within our teams, discussing and debating about what images we will use, which topics about Geometry we will talk about and which information will be added to our final selection, we are now ready to start working with Thinglink.

Our teacher opened a student group for each class in Thinglink in order to have a following tool for our work on our images. This will be another feature to take into account when assessing our work, both form peer-to-peer point of view and from the teacher's point of view:

In addition, it will allow the different teams to have up to date information about the work of each other's, in order to keep feedback in constant movement.

Of course, for any student or the teacher to have a complete vision of any team work progress, we have kept using our SMART Amp workspaces and the class ones which you can watch here:

You can follow our progress on our team blogs (remember we published their links in a previous post of this class blog), so... keep up to date!!

Meanwhile, here you have some examples of our AR enhanced images on Thinglink:
G4 - Arhitecture
G7 - Human body
G5 - Stellar geometry
G5 - Mandalas
G7 - Sports

SEK-Atlantico International School 10th grade students A & B

Developing the pilot and publishing blogs

After some introductory work, done in the most part by our teacher, we need to start developing the topics distributed amongst all the teams.

As we are near 60 students, divided inton to classes, we agreed with our teacher in formin teams of 4, so we have 7 teams per class. We agreed as well that each team will take its name from the topic assigned, and so we are:

Food and Geometry team

Technology and Geometry team

Technology and Geometry team

Architecture and Geometry team

Fashion and Geometry team

Fashion and Geometry team

Sports and Geometry

Stellar Geometry team

Architecture and Geometry team

4D Geometry team

Nature and Geometry team

Human Body and Geometry team

Mandalas and Geometry team

Nature and Geometry team

As a following tool for our projects, our teacher asked us to open a blog and to post in such a way that anyone could be up to date of our progress; moreover, we have to remember that we students have to assess other teams' work, so these will be so useful tool for that task. Here is the list of the blogs:

Food and Geometry team blog: http://geometricfood.blogspot.com.es/

Technology and Geometry team A blog: http://itectechnologyteam.blogspot.com.es/

Fashion and Geometry team A blog: http://itecmodas.blogspot.com.es/

Architecture and Geometry team A blog: http://architecturengeometry.blogspot.com.es/

Stellar Geometry team blog: http://stelargeometry.blogspot.com.es/
Nature and Geometry team A blog: http://natureitecgroup.blogspot.com.es/
Human Body and Geometry team Blog: http://geometryandthehumanbody.blogspot.com.es

Architecture and Geometry team B blog: http://geometriaenlaarquitectura.wordpress.com/

4D Geometry team blog: http://teseracto.blogspot.es/

Technology and Geometry team B blog: http://itectecnologia.wordpress.com/

Mandals and Geometry team blog: http://geometriaymandalas.wordpress.com/

Sports and Geometry team blog: http://geometrysportssek.blogspot.com.es/

Fashion and Geometry team B blog: http://geometryforfashion.wordpress.com/

Nature and Geometry team B blog: http://geometriaenlanaturaleza.wordpress.com/

If you want to contribute, please don't hesitate to visit our blogs and comment some of the posts you will find there!!

SEK-Atlantico International School 10th grade students A and B

Starting with tools!!

In this session, our teacher explained us some of the tools we are going to use as we develop the pilot over the next weeks. He presented us four tools he's going to use to assess our work and we will use as tools for collaboration, feedback and inspiration on our mates work as well as for peer to peer assessment. These tools are: TeamUp, SMART Amp, Thinglink and blogs.

TeamUp:

This is a basic iTEC tool, used to create and manage teamwork. As we've written in a previous post, we've used it for building balanced teams taking advantage of mental notes and language assignment features:

We'll use it to monitor the development of our work through the flashes recording feature.

SMART Amp:

The new tool for collaborative work of SMART Technologies is an online tool based on Google Apps for Education. Every student has his/her user and from every kind of internet allowed device access is available everywhere at all time.

Here you can see the teacher's dashboard, where he/she can create classes or invite students; once in a class,

the teacher can manage the students connected and share with them the workspaces (that are the main object of Amp and the basic place for collaboration). Stored and shared via Google Drive, workspaces can be shared within the class or amongst any selected group of students (or even with other teachers in order to develop multidisciplinary tasks or activities).

In this image you can see both the teacher and a student workspaces, one in his/her own drive and the other in his/her shared folder.

Workspaces are canvas where any object can be inserted and modified by any user sharing it, in a collaborative environment where all of them can share their work, inspire others, foster debate, feedback others' work, etc:

Thinglink:

As one of the main objectives of our LS "Virtual Museum" in to use Augmented Reality, our teacher presented us Thinglink, a free and simple tool to add information to an image, enhancing the experience of watching it and providing the vehicle to allow us share content with our learning community. Our teacher showed us some examples of how an image would be after adding information and how to do that:

Here you have the links to the examples provided by our teacher:

example1, example 2, example 3.

Blogs:

As part of the feedback and assessment process while developing our pilot, our teacher asked each team to open a blog about our topic. The idea is to have a way of keeping track of the process complementig the updated information of each session provided by TeamUp recordings. Our teacher asked us to use some free blog platform and he presented us some examples from previous iTEC pilots. Nevertheless, as we use blogs in a daily basis in our school as part of the communication process, this activity will be part of our class rutine, but with the incentive of spreading our contributions in the iTEC platform and in other sites.

In the next post we will share our blogs links in order to make sharing a real part of our work in this iTEC cycle 5 pilot.

Stay tuned!!

SEK-Atlantico 10th grade students, classes A and B.

Creating teams and selecting topics

As we planned for our next session, it was time to distribute work...

Our teacher told us that, taking into account (and taking advantage as well) of the experience of previous iTEC cycles, the best way to take the next step, forming teams and distribute topics, was to do both things in the same session. For that, he previously asked us (as homework) to make a little inquiry and think on what aspects of real life we can establish relationships with geometry. With those ideas, he asked us to relate them with the topics proposed in a previous session, in order to have a first-sight selection of topics to distribute amongst the teams we were to form. With that selection on the SMART Board, we used the voting feature of TeamUp tool to select our top seven topics, which would be distributed amongst the teams formed.

With all this work done, we started to organize our work within our teams: research and inquiry about the topic, images relating the topic with geometry and our interests, use of TeamUp flashes recording feature to give and obtain feedback and assessment, create blogs for following, feedback and assessment,…

To give even more interest and make things even more engaging, our teacher explained us a brief introduction to the use of SMART Amp, that soon will be at our disposal to work collaboratively…

Next sessions seem to be exciting!!

Using TeamUp to characterize students

As we are going to develop part of work as teamwork, we need to define a set of characteristics in order to build balanced teams: as our teacher told us, as in real life, we cannot rely on our friendship or trust that random selection to form teams (these are another experiences of previous cycles that he explained not to be so successful). That’s why we made use of TeamUp “mental notes” features in order to build a set of common characteristics that could define a categorizing system that would take us to form those desired balanced teams.

Our teacher and us agreed in four of the TeamUp icons to define such characteristics: “bee”, “book”, “scissors and papers” and “tech items”; we gave them the meaning of “hard worker”, “good expression”, “creative” and “tech geek”;

in addition, we added the languages each student is literate enough to communicate online (we found many English and French spoken specimens, but even one Portugese, one German and one Russian speakers!!). After that, each student chose which two characteristics better define him/herself, in order to allow TeamUp to form our teams with the biggest amount of information.

With all of that, we were ready to form our teams…

First sight to our Learning Story

Our teacher, Gonzalo Garcia, presented to us the Learning Story we are supposed to develop: Virtual Museum. To do that, our teacher showed us a SMART Notebook 14 presentation where we were told the different steps we are going to follow in order to finally build our Virtual Museum.

As a first step we were told what tools we are going to use through the pilot:

We are lucky as we are able to participate in piloting two new tools from SMART Technologies: SMART Notebook 14 and SMART Amp. In addition, we were shown what Augmented Reality is and what it can be used for to enhance an image with attached information. For that, our teacher showed us some examples using Thinglink:

As a final step for this session, we were asked to propose topics to develop in teams and assessment criteria to evaluate both p2p and from the teacher's point of view. For this we used Extreme Collaboration add-on to SMART Notebook 14:

Here you can see examples of what we proposed:

 

 

In the next session, we will create the teams and distribute the topics selected in a first step...

Stay tuned!!

10th grade students, Groups A & B

Starting!!

Once more, a new iTEC cycle has started and SEK-Atlantico International School 10th grade students are engaded!!

As you sure remember, SEK-Atlantico International School is a private school in Pontevedra, in the middle of Rias Baixas region (Galicia), on the Northwestern corner of Spain.

Our plan is to develop Virtual Museum LS, which was created in a collaborative workshop that took place in our school conducted by Ainhoa Marcos (Education Programs Manager EMEA, SMART Technologies; here you can read her blog) and Gonzalo Garcia (Maths and Physics teacher at SEK-Atlantico International School and SMART Exemplary Educator).

We are two classes of 10th grade students with a total of 56, and we are planning to work in teams formed by 4 or 5 students. We are lucky as we are piloting the new SMART tool for collaborative learning, SMART Amp, and we are planning to use it extensively during this iTEC pilots...

So, come on and join us in this trip!!