The Amazing Spider-man AR

I have been playing around with augmented reality for a few months.      We are at the beginning of AR possibilities and future developments will be exciting.  As much fun as I have had with it, I have wondered how it could be used in the classroom.

While at the Slide2Learn conference in July, I attended a workshop on AR facilitated by Nathan Jones.  Jones talked about how he uses AR in the classroom with his students.  Using AR to spark ideas for story-writing was one of the ideas he shared.

The Amazing Spider-man AR is a great app for Spiderman lovers.   By downloading the free app from the App store, and printing the series of free markers from the site, users can shoot spiderman's web, swing across buildings, capture baddies and climb brick walls.  Lots of ideas for story starters here.  I can see that reluctant writers could be drawn in to story writing this way.

Lego Super Hero Movie Maker

This Lego app - the Super Hero Movie Maker -  uses stop motion to record movies.  This app is simple to use and it takes no time to create a movie.  It works well on all iDevices and best of all it is free.

Users can select from a range of title pages, soundtracks and filters, all with a super hero theme.

Check out a quick movie made in less than two minutes by one of my children (I am sure the storyline will get better with practice :-)

Postnote:  After making the original movie above and showing it to others , adiscussion was had about clarity of photos and the need for the story to flow with two children working together for the next version .......... will be interesting to see where this develops.

Also check out the animation from Room 7 at Normandale School where they have started using the Lego Super Hero Movie Maker.

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Location:Lego Movie

Radio NZ

One of my colleagues, Justine Mason, shared this fab free app with me today. The Radio NZ app not only lets you listen to Radio NZ programmes live, it allows you to select and listen to content from previous shows. If you miss an inteview or report, add it to your playlist and listen when the time is convenient.

The app works on iPad, iPhone and iTouch.



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Scrabble Anyone?

I love a good board game over summer with the family:-) My children are now teenagers and it is much harder to entice them into playing with me! At the end of last year a friend of mine was playing scrabble, on his iPhone, against his partner who was then living in Australia. This intrigued me, how cool that they could play a game together from different countries! Since then, I have utilised good old google and you tube to find out more! I am yet to get together with my family to give it a try and look forward to a weekend at the beach over Waitangi weekend to entice them. I am also going to introduce this concept to the teachers at Whangarei Primary and suggest children in different classes trial playing games of scrabble together:-) Would love to hear from anyone who has tried scrabble on the iPad/iPod out:-)

QR Reader

I have been doing some work with QR Codes and have tried out many different apps to find a reader that works well and can also create codes as well.

I have found QR Reader to be an effective app because it scans and reads codes quickly, can read in many different types of light and angles and keeps a history of the codes that have been read.  As well as a reader, QR Reader is also a code creator as well enabling users to create text, web, contact code, sms or geo location codes.  Once created, the QR Codes can be shared using email, twitter facebook and more.