Preschoolers and Augmented Reality
Updated: Jul 17, 2018
Guest post: Amanda Ebbott
Hello all!
My name is Amanda and I’m an early education major here at Grove City College. Through my Technologies of Instruction class, I had the amazing opportunity to work with amazing kids! During the time we spent in the preschool, we helped the kids discover educational and fun activities using augmented reality! If you were like me a couple of weeks ago when Dr. Fecich first started talking about AR, and had no clue what that meant, have no fear! An explanation is on it’s way!
Augmented reality content can be reached by scanning a mobile device over a certain image that then allows you to view whatever the image leads to such as a video, an animation, a game, another image, or whatever you want it to be. When used in the classroom, you can use it to present educational content in a fun and interesting way! There are lots of great apps that use augmented reality to teach kids such as Popar Toys, Daqri, Quiver, and Chromville. With the preschoolers, we used Quiver to make various animals and creatures come to life, which was so much fun for everyone involved!
So you may be asking yourself, “Why should augmented reality become a part of my child’s classroom?”. If you are, you’re in the right place again. Augmented reality can transform any classroom, and automatically make it more engaging for the students involved. AR can also give your students a learning experience that allows them to look beyond the classroom walls; something you couldn’t get without augmented reality. In addition, implementing this in the classroom speaks loudly and helps with those students that are visual learners. If you need a couple other reasons, AR allows for great interactive lessons, the opportunity to use portable and less expensive learning materials and allow for a higher retention rate. Even if you’re not using them for educational purposes, and even if you’re not in school, there are so many cool things you can do with augmented reality. I enjoy just coloring the leftover pictures we had from working in the preschool and making some dolphins come to life!
We are so blessed to have been provided with the knowledge to create all of this amazing technology, and we can create so many wonderful things with it, and building the brains of the future generation is just one small way.