"The Important Thing" about Augmented Reality

The important thing about augmented reality is that it is a great way to merge digital and analog student-created content. It is true that with the free app Blippar, it is simple enough for third graders to use. It offers great options for a student publishing project, and will likely response many positive reactions from your entire learning community. But the important thing about augmented reality is that it is a great way to merge digital and analog student-created content.

Many may recognize this text pattern from Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book. Recently this text was used as the basis for a third grade project in Mrs. Pistulka's reading class while learning about their local community history.

Katie Morrow from ESU 8 worked with the class to assemble the pages students wrote and the illustrations they created into a book modeled after “The Important Book” by Margaret Wise Brown. Then we made the pages “come alive” through augmented reality. Basically, if you download the free Blippar app on your smart phone, and enter our localized "code", then you can scan the pages of the book and videos will “pop up” where the students teach you even more!

Here are the steps completed in the process:

1. Mrs. Pistulka encourages her reading class to learn about community history in creative ways. First students learned about O'Neill's past by interviewing a local historian and viewing past projects.
2. Second, students selected a key person who has had an impact on our community of O’Neill. Each 3rd grader researched their "Important Person” and took notes. 
3. They then wrote their narratives for the pages of the book, modeled after Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book.
4. Next, students decided on an additional fact or interesting tidbit to share out loud in their video.
5. Mrs. Morrow helped us film in front of a greenscreen that we borrowed from the Eagle Eye News crew.
6. Each student created an illustration to go with our page and hand-wrote our “Important Book" text onto a template page. 
7. Mrs. Morrow took photos of all our pages and uploaded them to BlippBuilder hub to make them come alive with Augmented Reality (AR).
8. Finally, Mrs. Pistulka sent our book off to be printed so we could share our creation with others!

And here is the end result:

on iBooks (free for anyone with a Mac or iPad to download and try out)

The Important Book of O’Neill, Nebraska

and physical books printed through Blurb.com (approximately $6 for each economy color, soft-bound  trade book).