As I began reading through the executive summary of the K-12
Horizon Report, I felt relieved to see that the significant challenges that
occur at the local level in education in executing ambitious plans in
technology implementation were acknowledged with the sentence, “ While there are many local factors affecting
the practice of education, there are also issues that transcend regional
boundaries and questions we all face in K-12 education; it was with these
questions in mind that this report was created.” This article was not written to address what
can be done now but what could be done sometime soon. After
reading that, I felt more motivated to continue reading the article, because I
felt that it would be an informative guide to things on the way, but I felt no
sense of urgency or pressure that such technologies would or should be put into
districts right away.
It was reassuring to be familiar with all six technologies,
although I have no real expertise in them.
Nothing was completely foreign to me.
After reading about each of the technologies, I thought that the technology
that would have the most significant impact on my instruction as a high school
chemistry teacher was augmented reality.
However, I found it interesting, and worth noting, that AR on a large,
practical scale would not be possible without the other mentioned technologies,
particularly mobile devices, apps, and/or tablet computing. It is exciting to think that with the
exponential growth of technology, in five years, as predicted by the report, AR
could be commonplace in many classrooms.
From the information presented in the report, the suitability
of AR in education was obvious to me although it is still most commonly used
for marketing or entertainment purposes.
It makes me proud to see Philadelphia as a front runner in AR
implementation. The project of the City of Philadelphia
Department of Public Records, which makes historic photographs visible via a
mobile device at the location where the photo was taken, would be great for a
field trip, and although it was not created specifically for education, it is
surely of value to anybody interested in learning about the history of the
city.
From what I read, it seems
that the technology necessary to create AR experiences is becoming more
accessible and easier to create. Since
I am still in the early stages of my teaching career, I hope that I will one
day be able to use it in my own chemistry classroom. I think that most teachers would agree that
active learning and an environment in which students can be actively engaged is
far more effective than an environment in which students are passive. While the video linked below shows what AR
for chemistry might look like, it would be far more exciting to have 30
chemistry students viewing and manipulating the enzymes and complex molecules, analyzing
the data that can be calculated, and making it accessible to their teachers and
classmates via the internet.
AR would make my classroom environment more active, because
it will provide a more dynamic representation of the atoms and atomic
interactions which my students study than I can currently provide for them. “Dynamic processes, extensive datasets, and
objects too large or too small to be manipulated can be brought into a
student’s personal space at a scale and in a form easy to understand and work
with.” Helping students to visualize
such processes or datasets, has been one of my biggest struggles as a chemistry
teacher. Physically bringing them into
the student’s personal space would be remarkable.
I love the thought of augmented reality in a classroom setting. Although I have not seen a great example of how it can be used in a high school math setting to this point, there is a high level of excitement at just the prospect of bringing this into schools around the country. I have seen it used in theme parks, stores, on TV, etc. and it is something that adults and children alike are unable to resist. The increase in student participation will be huge as AR applications continue to be developed for classroom use.
ReplyDeleteScott, based on what schools are doing with augmented reality so far, it holds a lot of potential for visual students and those who learn best with objects that they can move and manipulate. This would be useful in science in studying atoms, molecular structures, etc. In math, this would help students with geometrical shapes, graphs, etc. AR makes subjects 3-dimensional which will benefit those students that aren't served by drawings on a chalkboard. Connecting it to mobile devices, tools like Scvngr and Google Goggles allows students to take their learning outside the four walls of the classroom.
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