Soft Technology

There have been plenty of occasions when my classroom has resembled a zoo! But today, through Augmented Reality, we actually turned our EYFS classroom into a real zoo! I've blogged about different ways you can use Augmented Reality (you can read them here) and it never ceases to amaze pupils and bring that moment of awe and wonder that technology can provide. The app we used today was LEO AR camera . Using Apple's ARkit, the app allows you to scan the ground and place 3D animated objects into the real world.  There are a range of different objects you can add including different animals and dinosaurs. There is a horror option which may not be appropriate for your pupils . Today, we just used this app on my teacher device.   There is a record option which allows you to video the animated object within the scene alongside your pupils. This is a little buggy at the minute so today we just used the screen record option of the iPad to capture the interaction between the...

Before I start discussing what we did, it is only right to share where the original idea for this project came from. This blog post by the brilliant @Joe_Moretti  gave me the inspiration for this project - AR STORYCUBES PROJECT I have been using my iPad with my children to support them with their reading journal homework for a while now. My boys struggle with their handwriting and find it very onerous to write even though they have some great ideas. As discussed by @MrTullock at the Animate2Educate conference last week, technology should be used to enable children to show their knowledge and understanding even if they struggle with an element such as decoding or handwriting or spelling. I loved a quote he shared, and I have linked it in a poster to the story @CarolJAllen shared around the latest BGT winner. I want to use technology so my children and pupils can create content to express themselves, their knowledge and their understanding. Making our own Interactive Avengers ...

You may remember a project I did with Year One last term: I decided to do a similar project with Year Three for their science topic about the Human Body.  We started with the Curiscope Virtuali-tee. This amazing augmented reality t-shirt never fails to create a lesson of awe and wonder! If you've not ordered one of their t-shirts, I would highly recommend it. Buy a t-shirt here. As a class, we explored all the different parts of the body and used the guide to learn facts about how our body works and what each organ does. The children were then given a part of the body and given some more time to find other facts about it. Using the app Chatterkids Pix, the children had to create animated videos sharing their learning. The students also used Greenscreen to create images giving the illusion we could see inside their body. Using Seesaw, they labelled all the different parts of the body: To link everything together, we used the app Thinglink. This allowed all the pupils to em...

A few years back, I put together an eBook - 15+ ideas for the emoji keyboard in class.  The eBook shared some useful and inspiring ideas for how to utilise the emoji keyboard. I have since blogged about using Bitmoji in class.  This is another great tool that allows teachers to turn themselves into a cartoon and then create images such as these to share with your pupils: I have just seen a blog from Mr Hill who shares some more ideas for Bitmoji, you can read it here. More recently, there has been a new tool that seems to have dominated every social media platform and that is GIFs. To define a GIF: An animated GIF is an image encoded in graphics interchange format (GIF), which contains a number of images or frames in a single file and is described by its own graphic control extension. The frames are presented in a specific order in order to convey animation. An animated GIF can loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences. GIFs seem to be everywhere and for the past few m...

Today I worked with one of our Year 3 classes and I eventually had the chance to try out a new app I've been desperate to use - Figment AR . I first heard of this app after reading a blog post from the brilliant @ICTEvangelist . You can read his blog post here: Figment AR For Story Telling And Re-Living Field Trips In IOS   The feature in the app which I was immediately drawn to was the portals feature. This allows you to place a portal within your world. This portal allows you to travel to any 360° image. There are a couple of pictures included but you can also add your own. Straight away I knew this would be something that would inspire some amazing writing in my class and today I finally got the chance to have a go with our brilliant Year 3 pupils. But as I always discuss on my CPD and INSET the big hook was what they were going to do with their writing which was to bring it to life and create their own movie! As their topic is linked to space, we decided to use a 360° image of ...

In my sessions each week at Davyhulme, I have been working on a project with my Digital Leaders. As a school with a motto 'Reaching for the Stars,' I wanted the pupils to create a display that would inspire children to persevere and not let failure stop them achieving their goals. The idea was inspired by something I saw at Candleby Lane School in Nottingham. They had a display featuring stories from teachers talking about how they have failed and how they overcame that failure. So we did the same, we asked teachers to share stories of times when they felt they had failed and how they worked through it and didn't let it stop them from achieving their goals. I feel this is a really powerful thing to share with our students to make them understand that everyone will have ups and downs including their teachers. Here is my example: The Digital Leaders also researched famous people who had also struggled in their journey to reach their goal. To share what they had learned, they ...

One of the most exciting new features of Apple's iOS11 is the new ARKit and the possibilities with this new feature. The downside, as I discovered last week, the new AR apps will only work on devices with A9 or A10 chips. After installing these apps on most of our school devices, I quickly discovered they didn't work and had to change my plans quickly.  My Year 6 digital leaders did, however, get to try these apps out on my iPad. First, they started with the app AR Runner . The app used AR to create checkpoints which you run to as a way to complete different challenges. It is a great way to combine technology with PE as the children are timed when completing the challenges. Word of warning though, make sure you have decent cases on your iPads as no doubt there will be a few accidents when your pupils are into the game.  The Year 6 pupils all had a few attempts of completing a challenge and collated their scores on a Google Sheet.  Using another Augmented Reality app - Gra...

Year 1 are learning all about the human body. Today, we used technology to enhance this topic further. First, we used the brillaint Virtuali-tee app from Curiscope. Click here to read more about this app . To order a t-shirt, click here. Year 1 loved learning about the human body today through Augmented Reality! Thank you @curiscope_official! A post shared by Lee Parkinson (@ict_mrp) on Oct 12, 2017 at 9:24am PDT Once we had explored and discussed the different parts of our body, the children all took turns wearing a green t-shirt and used the camera to photograph each other. They pupils then used Doink Greenscreen to create a picture that looked like we could see inside their body. Once the pupils had uploaded their pictures to Seesaw, we used the explain and reflect tool in Seesaw to label the major organs.  Finally, with the help of our Digital Leaders, some children were able to record a video explaining how some of our organs work, see the video here: The children loved u...

I love using technology to create moments of awe and wonder with my pupils. Two of the best tools for this are Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Imagine an app which combines both to make learning about the Human Body more fun and interactive than ever before! I have been following the progress of the Curiscope  project for the best part of a year after backing the campaign on Kickstarter. It is fantastic to finally see the app and t-shirt available. The app is FREE however it needs one of the t-shirts to work. The t-shirts come in a variety of colours and sizes and can be ordered here . Once you have the t-shirt, one pupil can wear it and the others can use the app on different devices to scan the t-shirt, where they are then able to see inside the body! As you can see with the following gif created with my sons. The app allows you to investigate different physiological systems such as the circulatory and respiratory systems. You can tap an option to have a voiceover share i...