Today started off with our presentations, including mine, Kirby, and Cass’.
The first presentation went over ways that social media and the environment go hand in hand, and can be used to spread awareness to vast amounts of people. An example given was the social following of Leonardo DiCaprio and Greta Thunberg, who both use their platform to spread awareness about the failing environmental health of the planet, and the increasing necessity for humans to take action. Social media can be a powerful tool in instigating change, and it’s important that it’s being used properly for the greater good.
The second presentation was on the mental health and the tools that are useful in creating a caring classroom environment that is aware of all students’ feelings and emotions. There were a number of great applications, such as Worrinots, which allows for students ages 5-8 to log and share their emotions to virtual friendly monsters who are there to offer emotional support. The monsters are coded to have thousands of customized/personalized responses, depending what words the students use to describe their problems (ie: sad, mad, frustrated, anxious, etc).
The third presentation was our presentation, which was the implementation of “Gamification” in the classroom. I’ve attached a permalink above to our GoogleSlide presentation.
The fourth presentation was about coding in the classroom, and what games are good to introduce and teach coding to elementary level students. A lot of the games that were played, we went over them last class with Rich. This included Scratch and Grasshopper.
After all the presentations, we divided in groups for VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) to learn about both subjects, and participate in activities. Virtual reality is done with the headsets, while augmented reality is done with Ipads to find “hotspots.” My first group was AR. We learned about how AR is used in the workplace (planning, mapping, receiving instruction) as well as to spread awareness about WWII in a Kits high class. The way they did this made the learning process so much more interactive was really well done. War can be a topic that can be taken for granted, particularly amongst students who have no point of reference to practice empathy, so this is a really great way to make real life connections to these students. HP reveal is the app we used to follow along with the AR activity. I made my own aura on the projector in the room.