A Dose of Fiction

Operium Baldwin, a fifth-year kindergarten teacher in Crosby ISD, has noticed that her kindergarten students are more engaged and more likely to complete reading assignments when they involve fictional text. Since Mrs. Baldwin’s students were recently reading a variety of nonfiction materials, she wanted to find a fun way to engage her students, reinforce the concepts she had taught them, and allow her students to apply those concepts so that they would become more aware of their real-world environment.

Mrs. Baldwin began incorporating augmented reality—the process of using technology to layer virtual content on top of real-world situations—into her classroom literacy stations to get her students excited about reading and applying concepts taught using informational text. As her students began a unit on Arctic Animals, she used a variety of real pictures of different arctic animals to create PicCollages. Then, she smashed the Pic Collages with Aurasma Studios (an augmented reality program) to create augmented reality posters. During literacy rotations, the students can scan the posters to see that arctic animal come alive in a video. After the students watch the video, they apply what they learned by completing a graphic organizer about the arctic animal.

By incorporating augmented reality lessons into her literacy stations, Mrs. Baldwin’s students manipulate and interact with the world around them to learn new information—and best of all, they can take a field trip into the worlds of different arctic animals without leaving the four walls of the classroom. “Technology has a prominent place in the classroom,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “While it doesn’t take the place of hands-on learning, it adds to it. Augmented reality has allowed my students to become independent, collaborative learners and take ownership in their learning.” #txed Crosby ISD