In Dunleavy and Dede’s except from “Augmented Reality Teaching and Learning,” they looked at AR in mobile technologies such as handheld tablets and smartphones in informal and formal settings.  At the beginning of the reading, they distinguished the differences between the two major types of AR 1) location-aware (videos, text, audio, graphic, etc. that are activated as you move through an area via GPS), or 2) vision-based AR that is activated with a QR code.  I liked the quote they included here, “These two forms of AR (i.e., location-aware and vision-based) leverage several smartphone capabilities (i.e., GPS, camera, object recognition and tracking) to create “immersive” learning experiences within the physical environment providing educators with a novel and potentially transformative tool or teaching and learning (Azuma et al., 200 I; De de, 2009; Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, &
Haywood, 2011 ),” especially the use of the word “immersive” and “transformative.”  This idea of AR making for an immersive and transformative experience for students was one of the reasons why I choose this for one of my readings this week, to hopefully learn more about AR and think of ways to include it in my own classroom.

Of the two types, this reading focused on location-aware AR.  They said one of the main drivers for this push toward AR is that there is, “One of the major criticisms of instruction…is the low rate of far-transfer generated by presentational instruction. Even students who excel in educational settings often are unable to apply what they have learned to similar real-world
contexts.” This really stood out to me, because it is something they have been hounding us on during our professional development sessions this year, and also looking for in our informal walk-throughs each week.  If they see too much “teacher lead” discussions or lecture, we’re getting it mentioned in our notes.  Because of this, I’ve been trying to find something more interactive than simply a virtual field trip, like AR, for my Greek and Shakespearian plays.  I haven’t found anything groundbreaking yet, but I did run across this very neat article that talks about AR in theatre and some of the struggles/benefits to using it!

In the next section, they showed a detailed graph of different AR that four major research groups looked into.  They then break down their findings.  A few of their positive findings were that the 1-to-1 device ratio led to more ways for students to participate, it allowed educators to use physical space differently, it encouraged unique note-taking opportunities, and it showed significant increases in students motivation.  Of these positives, the one that most appeals to me is the increase in student motivation.  I feel that this would be challenging to accurately “measure” and so stating it so boldly must mean that it was very significant.  If I could increase my students’ overall motivation to want to learn – I’d be extremely grateful!

Next, they addressed some of the negatives.  With the number one issue surprising me, cognitive overload.  Rarely do I think of cognitive overload, and yet – when I stopped to think about it, this does make a lot of sense.  Students in an immersive learning experience could very easily become overwhelmed, I see it every day especially with my new students in an online classroom.  Too many tabs, too many overdue assignments, too many…xyz.  In an immersive environment, seeings all sorts of directions and options at once might lead some students to shut down completely.  This section also talks about the cultural and developmental hurdles that designers and educators face.

The next section dives into the details of the design features of AR.  It touches on location, narrative, roles, and experience mechanics.  If you’re at all interested in the development and ideas that AR research has come up with to make AR something that designers could make easy for educators to work on themselves, I would recommend looking over the outline on pages 741-743.

The reading ends by saying, “Due to the nascent and exploratory nature of AR, it is in many ways a solution looking for a problem.  More accurately, AR is an instructional approach looking for the context where it will be the most effective tool amongst the collection of strategies available to educators.”  After reading this piece of AR, I have realized that this isn’t a good direction to head with my lesson design.  I don’t even own technology that would allow me to do much with AR, I doubt that many of my students to either.  In addition, currently, AR is mostly conducted in a singular space.  My students are spread out all over the state of Ohio, we’re rarely, if ever, in the same place, making this particular form of lesson delivery, unattainable.  Glad to have learned more about a hot topic!  Perhaps with its development, this will someday be something I can use with my students.

Augmented Reality (especially games): Dunleavy, M., & Dede, C. (2014). Augmented reality teaching and learning.  (pages 735-745).

The reading from “An Online Badging System Supporting Educators’ STEM Learning,” was from the Learning, Design, and Technology department of Penn State University.  Gamrat and Zimmerman were both apart of the program it seems (my attention is officially grabbed).  Their research was looking at the informal use of badges in a professional development project. I chose this as a topic, because my current LMS system has badges as options for teachers to create and assign.  We can give them out to specific students, for example, I made a few badges that were for reading out loud in class or giving a particularly interesting response in class, showing improvement, etc., I also have badges set up to be earned when students complete a Unit, certain assignments, etc.  I wanted to learn more about the topic, to better utilize this feature for my students.

Gamrat and Zimmerman begin their study by defining digital badges, and explaining where they are mainly found.  They use the five key areas as identified by Antin and Churchill, for digital badging in social media and online games.  These five areas include, ” (a) setting goals and providing feedback on goal achievement, (b) providing instruction about what activities are possible, (c) building a user’s reputation based on interests, (d) serving as a status symbol and documenting achievements, and (e) showing affiliation with a community.”  Moving toward their studies with education, these five key areas adapted to something more like, “(a) rewarding and motivating achievements, (b) credentialing or recognizing learning, (c) acting as markers that learning has occurred for learners themselves, the learners’ teachers or mentors, and the learners’ peers.”

They explained that their overall goal was to, “examine learners’ badge-earning pathways in order to refine learning theory about how the things that learners learn in one setting can be applied to another consequential setting via computer tools,” their aim was to build on previous research that looked at how to think about designing for learning across different settings.

Here was their research question, “How do learners interact with elements of a digital badging system including the goal statements, logs, materials submitted to earn a stamp or badge, and their mentor?” in order to best answer this question, they looked at 36 teachers, and 11 of those in-depth, using a system called Teacher Learning Journey’s (TLJ), a professional development (PD) site that support K-12 STEM subject area badge drive PD.

Their findings were varied and interesting, to say the least!  One of the big highlights though were that teachers did not find the badges in and of themselves to be especially motivating, they felt that the content they were learning was motivation for the enough on its own.  While many of the participants valued badges higher than just earning a CEU, Gamrat and Zimmerman felt that it perhaps stressing the badges value may make them seem more desirable.  One major finding of their study was that the more personalized and specific a teacher’s goal was, the greater their experience with the TLG.

As I reflect on this study, I am trying to think of how I can use this information in my classroom.  The first thing I wonder about is the need for “choice” to be present for badges to be meaningful.  This was the big takeaway from the data that Gamrat and Zimmerman collected.  I challenge that this might just be the generation of learner.  Teachers in the study were, I’m assuming, older than 25, and this was conducted in 2014-2015…this is an entirely different learner than my students today.  Today, badges are ingrained in their lives from gaming that started for most of them, outside of the classroom.  I was first exposed to “badges” with video games, I find them highly motivating!  I am very motivated by the badge itself, I just want to collect them all (perhaps this is ingrained in me from those Pokemon days….gotta catch ’em all!)!  I get highly discouraged when earning them all is unattainable in a reasonable amount of time.  In fact, our school last year used Simplek12 for their PD, it was a badge-based system and I would be very surprised if I didn’t earn the most badges out of our 60+ teachers.  I was just…motivated!  Once I realized how LONG it would actually take me though…I started to lose interest after I’d earned all the ones I felt I could, in a reasonable amount of time.

My students love earning badges.  I give them out when I think of it, but reading this article and thinking about what I know about this “gamer” generation…I think this could be a powerful motivator!  I’m actually very excited to take this to the 10th-grade team on Friday to see if this can increase our engagement and student achievement through badges!

Badging: Gamrat, C., & Zimmerman, H. (2015). An Online Badging System Supporting Educators’ STEM Learning. In D. Hickey, J. Jovanović, S. Lonn, & J. E. Willis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Open Badges in Education co-located with the 5th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference (LAK 2015) (pp. 12–23).

For my final reading this week, I selected “E-books for Education Uses,” a study conducted by Davison and Carliner.  I’m not sure what to expect going into this reading, but as an English teacher, finding suitable e-books that are easy to read, navigate, download, and in a translation/format that I like, can be challenging!

The majority of this reading focused on defining what devices e-books were used on, the different formats that e-books were delivered in, and then moved on to the user’s acceptance (or lack thereof) of e-books in educational settings.  Interestingly enough, they did a lot of comparisons between e-books and printed books.  Many of their findings showed that a readers tendencies were consistent (for example, if they tended to skim) regardless of which type of book they were reading.  An interesting thing that I found in this section was the discussion of how varied e-books are compared to most textbooks.  Depending on the device, the book will have varied page lengths, font sizes, etc..  Thinking about this from a design point of view was interesting and not what I was expecting from this reading.  The reading ended by saying that, ” researchers need to continue exploring proof-of-concept projects that define what e-books are and how they integrate with other learning activities.”

I have to say, I was surprised by this reading.  It didn’t really hit on anything that I felt was “new information.”  But it did get me thinking about the design of e-books and the potential they have.

I remember a game I had growing up.  It was an interactive book on my computer.  It was a disc, and the story would play and the words would highlight as it read to me, or, I could turn that feature off and read it on my own.  The pages were interactive.  I could click on a word for it’s definition.  The story came to life.

I remember wanting more books like that.  And I know that there are similar software, games, and devices that do the same out there, but primarily for children’s books.  I see a great need for major works in literature to develop e-books with these features.  Clickable words, links to video integrated into the text for historical context, definitions, reading enrichment.  While we’ve been able to “digitize” our paperbacks, I think the need now it to catch these digital copies up to today’s technology standards.

I would LOVE to teach with e-books like this.  Integrating literary guidance (like some websites such as LitCharts) with the power of Google and video…it would be powerful.  Especially for this “older books” that students seem to have trouble engaging with.

e-Books: Davidson, A. L., & Carliner, S. (2014). E-books for educational uses.  InHandbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 713-722). Springer New York.