Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group Newsletter no. 5 - July 2015 | Page 62

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2015 Newsletter

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------feel alive, it makes content interactive and learning
a lot more fun and easy.
There are many brilliant ways of using AR in
projects and in class, regardless of the topic or
subject you teach. Delving into all of them is not
the purpose of this article, however. My intention is
to showcase one such app in particular, one my
students and I have first become acquainted with
through a Learning Event on eTwinning, led by a
fabulously talented team of experts, Arjana Blazic
and Bart Verswijvel.

What integrating Aurasma into this project did was
give it a new life, a new voice, so many voices in
fact. The students were so proud and it motivated
them to invest more in future projects.
Now, what would an app review be like without a
few samples? So, take your phones or tablets out
(some brands may not be compatible, it happens to
many other apps unfortunately, but don’t let that
stop you) and scan the image below and you’ll see
what we see every time we scan the exhibition. The
trigger image is of the interactive Zeemap we
created as one of the final products of the project
Let’s celebrate EDL together.

But let’s start from the beginning before you lose
your patience and stop reading this article. Just
what is Aurasma? It is a free app for iOS and
Android mobile devices. Aurasma's image
recognition technology uses a smartphone's or
tablet's camera to recognize real world images and
then overlay media on top of them in the form of
animations, videos, 3D models and web pages. The
image you use is called a trigger image and when
scanned with the app it will trigger whatever the
author used as an overlay, be it a video, an
animation or a link.
There are certain things you should know before
you start scanning for Auras. You can create them
online (https://studio.aurasma.com), on your
phone, iPhone or tablet, you can make them public
or private and you can basically display the trigger
images anywhere you need to.
Let me give you a few examples of how we have
used Aurasma so far. In September 2014 we joined
a project dedicated to the celebration of EDL
(European Day of Languages). It was your basic
EDL project, sending cards, speaking in other
European languages and singing in a few of them
as well. But then the Learning Event came along
and I figured AR would be great for our project. I
mean, we all create lovely exhibitions with the
cards but it’s just that, an exhibition –cards hanging
on the walls, you read them and move on and
that’s that.
For this project, my 3rd grade students had created
videos of themselves saying 1-2 sentences in every
partner’s language, about 13 languages give or
take. We figured we could create Auras for the
cards we had received from the partner schools so
when anyone (mostly parents, visitors, other
students) scanned say the card from Poland, a
video would start playing, a video in which one of
our students was speaking in Polish. We did this for
some of the cards, but kept the Auras private, for
safety reason.

In the months to come we played with Aurasma
some more. For another project called Young
Europeans Speak 3.0 (or YES 3.0 for short),
students had to create video or audio materials
about any topic they wanted to share with their
European peers, in one of the major European
languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish or
German). Those materials would be used as
authentic listening comprehension materials in
class. But since we wanted more people to be able
to access them we included the videos in ebooks
and the cover was enhanced using Aurasma.
Now, YES 3.0 came after YES and YES 2.0, so one
of the students from my school was the highlight of
the first cover. She had represented both previous
versions of YES at the national competition Made
for Europe (where she managed to get into 2nd
place both in 2013 and 2014), so we thought we
could celebrate 10 years of eTwinning by recording
a video message about the history of YES for all the
new partners (which meant most of them). And just
like