What is AR

Merriam-Webster defines augmented reality as an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device such (such as a smartphone camera). There are many different apps such as HP Reveal, Google Cardboard, Within and Lifeprint.

AR effects on education

The main results of the review article by Papanastasiou, G., Drigas, A., Skianis, C., Lytras, M., & Papanastasiou, E. (2019) on Virtual and augmented effects on K-12, higher and tertiary education students' twenty-first century skills were:

• Promote flexible, open and collaborative learning
• Provide realistic and interactive role-playing simulations
• Enable a greater variety of classes to be taught socially connecting people and organizations
• Fosters users' ability to "feel" the reality, change and modify it
• Improve substantially memory recall of lists with categorically similar items
• Students increased assimilation of knowledge as they increased their collaboration between them
• Potential for using them for areas such as entertainment, tele-working, e-commerce and research
• Develop students' higher order thinking skills encouraging learning by design
• Efficiency has been proved in almost all domains of the K-12 and higher education curriculum
• Virtual worlds foster students' social skills using avatars

Why use AR?

There are numerous reasons for using in AR in education, here are a couple. Two principles from the First Peoples Principles of Learning are: 1. learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). 2. learning is embedded in memory, history and story. Augmented reality apps can assist in linking learning to place, an important aspect in making learning personal and relevant to the learner. For example, using HP Reveal, labels identifying medicinal plants used by the local First Nations peoples can be scanned which opens up an overlay of information including the Shuswap name, uses of the plant and how to process it.

Tobin (2014), has five suggestions for increasing online student retention with universal design for learning. One suggestion is to let students do it their own way. "Allow students to select their preferred method of responding to the assignment criteria: write an essay, record a podcast, or create a video by putting their mobile-phone camera to good use. This makes assignments more engaging for students, and grading more engaging for faculty members, too.". One example of allowing the students to "do it their own way" is to have small groups of students construct a photo wall demonstrating their knowledge. Students will participate in a gallery walk where they can scan the photos created by their peers.

Life print

Life print allows embedding videos into pictures that can be scanned by the app. It does require a special printer that can be found for around $200 as well as special paper. Embedding a video can be accomplished quite easily using the Lifeprint app. Just choose an image on your mobile device, then decide what material you want embedded in the photo. The final step is to print the image which can then be scanned using the app.

References

Meriam-Webster (N.D.) Augmented reality. Retrieved on October 1, 2019 from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/augmented%20reality

Papanastasiou, G., Drigas, A., Skianis, C., Lytras, M., & Papanastasiou, E. (2019). Virtual and augmented reality effects on K-12, higher and tertiary education students’ twenty-first century skills. Virtual Reality, 23(4), 425-436. doi:10.1007/s10055-018-0363-2

Set BC (2018) First Peoples Principles of Learning. Retrieved October 1, 2019 from https://www.setbc.org/2018/07/classroom-technologies-and-first-peoples-principles-of-learning/

Tobin, T. J. (2014). Increase online student retention with universal design for learning. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education 15(3), 13-24