PanSIG 2017 AIU

Ready to rock&roll

May 19-21 saw JALT PanSIG visit Akita International University, with members and non-members coming together from all over the country, and even a few from further abroad, to present, exchange and share ideas. It was my first time attending a PanSIG conference, and I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to present; a poster presentation on using the mobile app Aurasma.

The entire process was very new to me, writing a proposal for my presentation, getting it approved, preparing all of my materials (with multiple backup copies!), ironing out any technical difficulties with Aurasma and finally standing in front of a crowd of people showing the ins and outs of my poster display.

Augmented reality guru Parisa Mehran checking out my work!

The preparation stage was a good opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate what exactly were my aims with using Aurasma, had I succeeded in attaining those goals and to reflect on ways to improve or do differently. It allowed me to view my project another perspective, the perspective of the audience. What questions would they have, what questions would I be asking if I were seeing some new tech for the first time and how I could translate it into my own teaching.

Leading up to the conference it was a mixture of first-time nerves and anticipating some sort of technical failure, but composed and collected knowing that I had put in the time and effort to create a poster display I was confident in showing to a group of language instructors. It was left in my hands to make the presentation a success.

An interactive poster with an interactive audience

One niggle that I did run into was that I had prepared my posters to be held up by magnets, being a modular poster with various segments it allowed me to have a more dynamic and interchangeable display, under the presumption from reading the PanSIG poster session web page that magnetic display boards would be available. You could imagine my disappointment when I reached the venue realised I had to pin all of my posters! I think it would be a benefit to future presenters if the advice on the official web page matched what was available on site on the day.

Contributions from attendees on the day

The day of the presentation was brilliant. There was a lot of interest and it was overwhelming at times with the number of people crowding around my display. I did come away thinking that I would have preferred the Saturday slot as there would have been even more people to get feedback from. Many conference attendees had to catch flights/trains to get back to their respective workplaces (Akita is not an easy place to get to and from!) for Monday morning, which meant that there was a significance turnout between the Saturday and Sunday poster sessions. Nevertheless, it was an amazing opportunity and my first experience presenting outside of local events.

Thank you to all those involved, especially the organisers for putting together a wonderful conference, Akita International University for a gorgeous venue and for the splendid hospitality, and all the presenters for an eye-opening weekend of professional development. A special mention to Jim for driving all the way there and back while I kipped in the front!

Augmented reality island poster

In an attempt to explore the potential of Aurasma (read more about it here on a previous posting) and bringing in an extra dimension (the augmented kind) into the classroom, my bi-monthly housewives class went on a journey into uncharted territory: using a smartphone app to expand their learning and augmenting analogue into digital.

This project, which spanned a couple of lessons, revolves around a remote mystery island. We began by learning vocabulary for types of terrain, points of interest and landmarks, alongside adjectives which they collocate to. This served as a base to be able to be more descriptive when it came to summarising the key features of the island.

Obviously, we need an island to describe before going about specifying what it looks like. Everyone was given a blank island, with a key to label the different types of terrain & landmarks: ocean, ruins, rivers, forest, lake and mountains, with space to add their own. Everyone used the key, plus their own ideas to design and draw their mysterious remote island. There were also caves, a lighthouse, and even a volcano added in amongst many others. This concluded the first lesson, with the homework task to go away and choose 5 special points of interest on your own map and write a brief paragraph for each location. Still very much all analogue so far…

2 weeks later we regrouped and ironed out any errors in the writing. What I wish I had done in hindsight is added in a listen and draw activity, where everyone paired up and listened to their partner’s description of their island and re-drawing the island as it is described. It would have really helped activate all of the useful language we had studied. Tunnel vision focusing on the final output with Aurasma may have obscured my vision here!

Alternatively, we split into pairs of speakers and listeners. The role of the speaker was to describe the special interest points on their map, first with their written summaries in hand, and after a few practise rounds over their summary to their listening partner, whose role was then to prompt when the speaker when they stumbled. For the finale, the listener video-recorded their partner (finally starting to go digital) much to the objection of those involved. At this stage they had rehearsed and practised their summary, not just reading out loud and were ready for the big stage. Even if they didn’t believe it themselves at the time.

I then went through the process of embedding the videos into everyone’s poster, using the images on their islands as trigger images. Jaws on the table when given my phone to point at their poster, and out pops an audio/visual combo of the creator describing what exactly it is that they are looking at. Pretty cool! It’s quite rare to be able to have a record of what students have produced orally and be able to showcase it too. Aruasma is the perfect medium to do so, and has a great WOW factor. It can make your 2D poster, into a living, talking, interactive masterpiece!

Chewing the fat - reflecting on Aurasma

              You’ve heard us rave about how brilliant Aurasma is and what an asset it has been to help “upgrade” our school. However, it hasn’t been all smiles and rainbows. There's been a lot of hard graft and careful planning going on behind the scenes. Even so, there were things that managed to slip past us or failed to take into consideration. So, with hindsight now on our side, here’s a run down of things which we would have done differently, plus some unexpected obstacles we stumbled across while putting our project together. You can also see a video summary if you feel so inclined.

            One of the biggest issues we came across was image recognition across different devices and tablets. There were a multitude of factors at play: poor camera quality, bad lighting, small drawings with faint lines and lack of colour. This lead to Aurasma having a little difficulty picking up some of our trigger images. Not ideal when you want to show off in front of eager parents after building up a lot of hype, then for it to not work at all. We heavily advise using images as large as possible with a combination of thick lines and bold colours. Don’t worry too much about the finer details, make sure it stands out.

            Also make sure that you spread out your pictures. For our birthday calendar, some months are more popular than others in terms of the number of birthdays. You only need to take one look at March to see it’s chock-a-block with students. This presents another problem for our trusty app; since the pictures are so close together, it sometimes detects an image other than the one you are currently focusing on. It’s a pain in the neck when the video you want to watch is interrupted by Jim’s self introduction instead (just as a hypothetical example of course).

            Another problem which came apparent towards the final stages was that parents, especially mums, had a hard time getting close enough to the drawings with device in hand. Some having to resort to climbing on the sofas in order to reach high enough! This was overlooked during the planning phase as we were primarily more concerned about fitting the display in the room, and out of reach of curious fingers. Me and Jim being over average height probably had something to do with it too. Definitely something to bear in mind when making your own Aurasma display. Defeats the purpose of having good content if nobody can reach/access it!

            Following on from the idea of accessibility, something we had to overcome on the job was making our content available to parents and visitors alike. As mentioned in a previous post, you must be following the creator’s “channel” on Aurasma in order to access their Auras. We weren’t actually aware of this when we first started, so you can imagine our bewilderment when Aurama didn’t work for any of our students or parents. The demonstration process would go smoothly, until the part when we got them to try using their own devices. At the time I put it down to devices with poor camera quality, but after many similar incidents, myself and Jim put our head together to fix our dilemma. With a little help from one of our students, Hikoro, and some trial and error, we managed to solve the mystery. We made an instructional video on how to “follow” a channel so nobody would have to suffer what we went through.

            So that concludes our first step into the realms of augmented reality. It feels as though we have only just dipped our toes into a vast ocean of endless possibilities. We look forward to using Aurasma more in the future, really immersing ourselves into the digital age and adding an extra dimension to the language learning venture. 

Food for thought with Aurasma - our story so far

Reflections on first attempts at embedding AR in our school. Short arms, analog mums, crayons vs pencils, and other minor issues explained.

Following a channel on Aurasma - the nitty gritty

Creating your great content is only part of the deal - making sure people can then find it is crucial! Clear "how to" from Damian at Luna International.

Augmented calendar - Luna's wall of names

So in the previous instalment, I spoke about what Aurasma actually is and how it works, leaving you all with a bit of a cliff hanger. This time round I will make good on my promise and demonstrate how we have integrated the app in our learning hub. Time for the “Tourasma” Don’t worry, what we’ve used it for isn’t as remotely lame as my puns.

            You may have already seen our “Rationalefor using AR in school”  and “Howto” videos (really recommend watching these as it shows our finished product) if you frequent our blog. I will be going into a bit more detail of the ideas touched on in the first video, plus the process of our journey with Aurasma. Also, there will be more videos to follow so make sure you subscribe to Jim’s YouTubechannel so you don’t miss out on any more future content.

            So the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Jim’s big idea. We needed something to brighten up the empty wall space in our waiting room, plus we wanted a way of remembering all of our students' birthdays. But we didn’t want just your typical run of the mill birthday display, we went all out for an interactive birthday calendar, with the help of Aurasma to bring it to life.

            Having settled on an idea, we got to work on our new project. Jim did the donkey work of making a lovely calendar with everyone’s names and birthdays tagged on. There was a fear of a lack of wall space, but a bit of ingenuity from Jim and we just about squeezed in all 12 months. The next step was adding the Augmented Reality. Let the fun commence!

            As we wanted this to be a student orientated project, we counted on them to provide us with some good quality content. We set about drawing self portraits, accompanied with a video recording during lesson time. Self portraits are fairly self explanatory, but for the videos we tried to add some spice and variation. We recorded some of our young learners playing a game or singing a song, with the older ones building up to a short self introduction using familiar language. For teens and adults, we had a bit of fun getting them to record and interview each other as an alternative to a monologue self intro.

            Having assembled all the pieces to our puzzle, all we had to do was put them all together, with Aurasma being the glue. We added everyone’s drawings to the calendar in order to create their “Auras” (If you don’t know how to make your own "Aura", you can read the previous blog post or watch the how to video) A lengthy process overall but well worth the effort. What we are left with is a display that shows what our students get up to during lessons, what they are capable of and how much fun they have, on top of serving as a birthday calendar. It’s a great feature for when we have visitors, as it allows them a peak at what goes on in ALL of our classes. Can’t come to observe one our classes due to time restrictions? No problem, you can have a look at what those students get up to with our birthday . The look of shock and wonder when parents and visitors alike see one our students pop up and their device and starts talking/singing never gets old.

We had a blast putting together our project and we would highly recommend you trying something similar. I will be following this up with another post on some of the difficulties we faced, and things we would do differently with a little hindsight. If you would like to see the display yourselves, don’t hesitate to swing by Luna to witness the magic of Aurasma.

Making your first "Aura"

With practice, making an "Aura" is easy. Damian shares our "How to" experience with clear & concise directions.

Rationale for using AR in school

School owner Jim George explains what he wanted to achieve in his language school's waiting room, that would really impress visitors and parents - by having a roomful of cheerful learners hanging around on the walls 24/7, introducing themselves and singing songs etc.

Augmented Reality (AR) - introduction to Aurasma

Have you heard of a really cool app called “Aurasma”? I used to be one the unfortunate souls who had no idea about the magic of Aurasma, until Jim kindly stepped in and enlightened me. So one cold December afternoon Jim calls me into his classroom as he has something to show me. He tells me to point his iPhone at a large drawing of Father Christmas on the wall. I was dumbfounded by what followed, I suspected witchcraft. The drawing came to life as an animated version of Santa popped up on the screen and began singing. After racking my brains, all I could muster was “How?” Jim, looking quite smug my reaction, then proceeded to fill me in on the magic of Aurasma.

The secret to Aurasma is that there are 2 key components; a video overlay and a trigger image. The video overlay can be anything you want, something you have recorded on your phone, any video format created through another app such as SockPuppets or ChatterPix Kids, even record something on the fly directly through Aurasma. Simple. On the other hand, setting up a trigger image can be a little trickier, especially if the resolution on your older phone camera isn’t up to scratch. The app is rather clever and is able to recognise images/drawings/patterns, and can then store them in its memory to be used as a trigger. Through experimentation, and getting fed up with spending more time than I would care to admit waving my iPhone around without much success, larger images with distinct outlines and plenty of colours helps with the recognition process. Having a steady hand doesn’t do any harm either.

Once you have prepared your overlay and set your trigger image, the final step is to combine them. Once you have made an “Aura”, you have the choice of making it private, which will only allow your phone to view your Auras, or public, which will enable followers of your Aurasma profile to access your content, as long as they have your Aura trigger on hand.

Now that you’re up to speed with Aurasma, you might be starting to form some ideas yourself on how to implement it into a learning environment. It was on the forefront of our agenda for a while too, and thanks to a bright spark idea from the man himself (Jim), we found a pretty cool way to show off our students’ work. His idea? Well, what I can tell you that is that you should tune in next week, where I will reveal our big idea to make Luna a truly interactive school. Watch this space! For the time being you can have a sneak preview of one our Auras starring Taisei.