Summary of chapter 5&6 of deeper learning

  As a teacher, his or her major job is to handpick best learning resources appropriated for differentiated students to suit their needs and learning pace. In this case, teachers are curators to help students authentically participate in learning and enhance their learning.

  Teachers can boost this curating process by bringing scannalble technologies like QR code and augmented reality to their classrooms, but they need to consider that if these technologies can really help student perform actively in learning process and increase their learning interests before they make decisions.

  Once teachers have located right digital resources for students, they can connect these resources to QR codes or AR triggers and efficiently distribute them to different students. For example, teachers can choose some websites which contain high-quality articles in different Lexile levels or multimedia resource and past relative links to a QR code generator to create a QR code for students to scan. Then teachers can assign tasks for different groups of students around a collaborative topic and let them interact with fellows. Although students scan the same QR code, they can explore something different according to their interests and then communicate with peers about their observations to achieve common progress.

  In addition to distribute tailored resources to students, teachers can use scannable technologies to make customized intervention in a differentiated classroom that they can provide different QR codes which contain different level of learning resource for students in different groups to facilitate personalized learning. Absolutely, teachers need changing connected contents in those QR codes to effectively assistant dynamic transformation of students’ needs.

  “Motivating students is an important part of an educator’s role in the classroom.” (page 51) Teachers should realize that active learning is closely related to students’ interests and a “wow factor” may obviously promote students’ learning initiative and motivate their learning progress. Fortunately, scannable technology can help students maintain interest and engage learning experience a lot with a “wow factor”.

  Students without any experience about AR before will feel excited and motivated if characters jump off the painting and come to interact with them in a three-dimensional view based on real-world settings when they scan the trigger images. Because of this, teachers can use augmented reality to grab students’ attention by giving students a few minutes to try it before the class and create a connection to the given contents later.

  Scannable technologies can also help teachers set clear expectations and consequences for students to work collaboratively. For instance, teachers can use some AR software to create their own experience by connecting collaborative tasks and relative resources or verbal guidance to dedicated trigger images for students in different groups. Students can easily get involved in by holding smart devices over images and scanning with great interest. After finished their own task, students can also try to scan trigger images for other groups and communicate with others in different group about their observations and experience around common topic to enhance learning.  

  In the process of scanning images and working with peers, students have more opportunities to communicate and interact with others than paper based work. Of course, not each lesson and activity in class needs trigger images or QR codes, teachers should find a balance on using these scannable technologies into class to make sure students’ interest can be maintained for a long time.