Learning Strategies – Science and Mathematics

Learning Journal 3

Learning Strategies – Science and Mathematics

Introduction

The journal that I have read for this week is called “Making it real”: Exploring the potential of Augmented Reality for teaching Primary school Science. The authors are Kerawalla, L., Luckin, R., Seljeflot, S. and Woolard, A. This learning journal will also begin with the gist of reading, then connections with my experience based on the journal, some confusions and conflicts found in the journal and some considerations and conclusions to end my learning journal entry.

(An example of Augmented Reality (AR) in Education)

Gist of Reading (Content)

This journal depicts the usage of Augmented Reality (AR) in formal education by introducing the technology use in traditional teaching ways. It is said that AR is useful in teaching as it allows students to see and visualise in 3D space that students were not likely to experience in the real world.  The participants were 133 children of Year 5 (aged 9 – 10 years) and their teachers were from five London schools. Then the average class size of five sessions were 27 and the total length of lesson (session) was 2 hours. The science subject showed in this article was on the relationships of earth, sun, and moon (e.g. rotation of the Earth and day and night). This journal focused on a comparison of the dialogue used by teachers’ engagement in teaching about the earth, sun and moon using either AR or more traditional methods (e.g. books and role-play). So, there were video recordings of teaching sessions and there were audio recordings of interviews with teachers. The results showed that it was successful in using AR to formal education that it was supporting and evidencing. Students were able to understand how the Earth and sun gives day and night by viewing in a 3D space. Also it was found that students were able to manipulate and explore which leads to promoting inquiry-based learning.

Despite there were some benefits and positive consequences usage of AR in the classroom, there were some limitations to it. Firstly, it was found that using AR to teach in classroom, students were less engaged than during one of the traditional teaching of role-play activity. During role-play, students were to create and control the roles of the actors whereas during class teaching using AR, students were to watch an AR animation and describe it. So teachers had more questions to ask rather students to tell their understanding during using AR teaching. In this consideration, using traditional method teaching was more engaging that teaching in AR method. Secondly, teacher wanted AR teaching method to be more flexible and controllable. They were not able to add and remove separate elements, and change animation sequences such as slowing down or stopping it.

Connection

For this week Learning Journal, there were two journals but I was more interested to read this journal than the other journal. This is because this journal had consist of one of my favourite learning during science class in primary. When I was growing up, after having class in primary on the relationship of rotation between the sun and earth, and day and night, I have been always recalling back the way my teacher taught those relations. This is because, the way of teaching was impressive as I was able to understand the relations very well without needing further explanations. Having these always recalling memories of teaching method on this topic, the content of this journal interest me to read. 

The way how I learned for the topic was through the traditional method that the journal had used. The traditional method in the journal includes firstly by book (to build prior knowledge to students) and then moved on to role-play session. During my learning through role-play, there were three students that acted as the Moon, Earth and Sun. The Moon were turning around while orbiting the Earth, the Earth was turning around with having orbiting Moon while orbiting the Sun. I can still remember this because I was really having fun and interest during this activity as all my classmates were verbally and phycially active, it was really funny to see my classmates (actors) bumping each other while orbiting together, and the fact being able to visualise and understand at once how the relationship between the Moon, Earth, Sun, the rotations, and day and night worked together.

I believe I was able to remember this teaching method and the relationship of Moon, Earth and Sun is because I am a bit like kinaesthetic and visual learner. The movement of acting, seeing how the moon and earth rotate while orbiting enabled me to picture and understand the topic very well. So I believe the traditional teaching was not bad as I had learned very well.

Confusion & Conflict

There were some confusions while I was reading this journal. I was unable to understand clearly on the key terms used even though there were explanations about them. I did not understand the concept of Virtual Reality, inquiry-based learning, head-mounted displays, and etc. I was mostly blur on the differences with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality but after my peers’ presentation of this topic, I understood it better as they gave different examples.

In my opinion, there are some limitations of using AR in classroom. Firstly, the tools for AR are very expensive which not many schools will have chance to stall it in the classroom. Secondly, due to expensiveness, not everyone will have the knowledge of how AR is used and functions. Thirdly, if the classroom provides AR and later one of the device of AR break or gets problems, who will be the one fixing/repairing it? There will be not so much people who can help out as not so many people will know about it. Furthermore, how can the teacher make sure that AR will able to access students’ understanding of AR and whether they use it correctly or not? Lastly, it may be useful to subjects such as Science (biology and physics), or geography but there are limitations using of AR to some subjects such as in English, Mathematics, History and etc.

Consideration and Conclusion

In this highly developing technology industry today, I believe when I become a teacher, there will be some AR usage in teaching such as science or geography or physics. Due to this circumstances, I would apply AR in my teaching as it is provided and because, although there are some limitations seen in this journal, it reports that AR is useful in students’ understanding. Students will be able to visualise it from different perspectives which will also corrects some misconceptions and able to build some new right understandings. Moreover, AR would be useful to visual-oriented learner as AR consist of a lot of visualisations whereby the objects of a particular topic shows in 3D spaces and explains it.

Therefore, if there were AR system in my classroom, I would consider AR into my teaching but I will not use only AR. I will first teach through traditional methods and then use AR. So, I will teach students to gain prior knowledge from the text book and also, give students a chance to imagine about the topic in their head first. After that, based on their imaginations and understandings, they will do some traditional activities. Finally, students can correct their understanding or further/increase their understanding through doing AR system in class. I believe these approach will enable students to have long-term memory on the learning topic and gain strong correct fundamental basics which will help them to develop their understandings in the future learnings.