Authors: Anna Ramírez, Mònica Tallada, Núria Tugues, Mireia Villena

For our AR group work, we planned on creating a board game in which we would include interactive and fun activities while working on English content and some AR features. Our board game works similarly to the famous game called in Spain 'La Oca'. It consists of a board with ten boxes (with a QR integrated into each). Some of them contain the activities (completely explained in the chart below) the diverse groups would have to do to finish the game. Other boxes on the board include some instructions to make the game more entertaining (ex: go back 2 spaces, start again, etc.). The aim of the dynamic is that after having read a short text about marine animals, the students would be able to practice vocabulary and content related to the text through the different activities. Moreover, we would use the AR tool named Siftr, which allows the students to upload evidence of their work done while geolocating it, so we as teachers make sure that they have done the activities in the places the instructions directed them to.

Through the option DISCOVER, you can search the Siftr (collection) you want and then you take a picture (turning on the geotag feature on your mobile device), select a category, answer the prompt and select the option of POST. Everyone can also comment on other people's posts.

Competencies that we would work on through the dynamic (A1 level):

Written Reception - Can find and understand simple, important information in advertisements, in programmes for special events, in leaflets and brochures (e.g. what is proposed, costs, the date and place of the event, departure times etc.).

Spoken Interaction - Can ask and answer simple questions, initiate and respond to simple statements in areas of immediate need.

Learning objectives: Students will be able to

Retrieve the newly learnt vocabulary and appply it.
Complete tasks following instructions.
Collaborate in the group learning.

Target level and group: 4th-grade students, A1 level of English.

Location: Indoors (classroom) and outdoors (different spots within the school environment, depending on the activity).

Context: The 4th-grade students have spent 6 sessions learning all about aquariums and endangered animals. The TU is based on the text 'At the aquarium' from the British Council webpage. They would have read an adapted version before, with the help of a glossary and visual aid, so it is not something completely new to them, in fact, this activity leads them to the end of the TU and the final reflections.

Full Lesson Outline:

How to use Siftr:

We can use Siftr to make fieldwork activities easy. Teachers take 5 minutes to create a Siftr and students use mobile devices to collect data and observations outside of the classroom. Siftr helps you focus students, organizes their data, and creates automatic visualizations to facilitate discussions in classrooms or online. As the terms of service state, this tool isn't for children under 13, but it might work well for high school classrooms or professional development. Younger students could help their teacher collect images as long as all images are posted through the teacher's account. You could even use Siftr to create a tagged-image collection by yourself and then ask students to draw conclusions about your data.

Activities Descriptions:

For the sake of class timing and the reduced number of classmates available to create groups, we have only developed two of the activities to be performed in the microteaching lesson.

Adapted text

This is the text children will have to read and understand in order to play the board game. They will be familiar with this text as it will have been worked on during previous sessions.

Board Game

This (sample) board game will be filled with the QR for the different activities. Each group will have a dice they will use to move accross the board. The students will have access online to the board so that they can roll the dice in all locations of the tasks.

Game 1: Miming

For this activity, the students will have to represent an animal they know without speaking, through body language. Their peers have to guess the animal using key language they can find in the language scaffolding worksheet.

During the activity, students will take pictures in order to show their learning with the AR tool.

Pictograms retrieved from Arasaac.

Game 2: Guessing

For this activity, students will have to describe animals they have learnt using descriptive words. They will have access to the game Concept Kids which shows pictograms of the characteristic features of animals. Students can point to the pictogram that represents the characteristic if they do not remember the name of it.

Image retrieved from Asmodee (https://b2b.asmodee.es/concept-kids-animals-ckasp01)

AR Output

After each group has finnished an activity, they have to record proof of completion of each game. To do so, they will take pictures of the development of the activity and upload it to the Siftr map with a short explanation of what they did.

Videos of the explanation of our AR dynamic in class:

IMG_3158.MOV

IMG_3161.mov

IMG_3162.MOV