Augmented Reality

I just returned from the Australia Literacy Educators Association (ALEA) conference in Sydney. Like all conferences that I've attended it put a fire in my belly to do better, to work smarter... and so since I've been home I've been sleepless trying to do the stuff I want to which includes using Augmented Reality in my teaching. The iPad I have has a camera roll and on it are some videos I've made but I want to be able to download my own videos from either my dropbox or my YouTube channel but I can't figure out how to do this without download Jailbreaker stuff which sounds, to me, kind of dodgy. So Augmented Reality... I downloaded an app Aurasma Lite onto my iPad. It can take pics and add another dimension including video to layer the meaning of the image, or add meaning to it. There are lots of entertainment applications for which this app is good. However, I would like to use it for an education purpose. Soon I have to do a professional development workshop for some members of staff at school, on visual literacy. That's not an issue, but I'd love to afford them learning opportunities using their iPads and this is how I think it should go. I have a range of visual images, science, history, images from picture books and the workshop I'm supposed to present is to help the teachers develop visual literacy skills so they can teach their students that images have more of a purpose than just to sit on the page and look pretty. Now NAPLAN isn't my favourite thing... actually I think it is reductive and dangerous and in many schools I fundamentally believe it is being misused by schools and that makes me both angry and sad. Anyway this workshop is to afford teachers opportunities to develop metalanguage and to apply the language of visual grammar in their own key learning areas so that students don't just cut to the image in their NAPLAN test without really using skills to analyse how the text (visual and linguistic) make sense together. Okay so I have images like this one:

and I've made a ppt movie like this one http://youtu.be/INuG5D8nHEM to show the ways the language of visual grammar can be developed. And a more specific examples is here: http://youtu.be/C0xYpvLm0kM And now this is the main frustration... with the iPad when I use Aurasma I can only access videos on my camera roll but I made this movies on my Mac... so I'm frustrated! Below is some of the grammar that will assist you when you analyse visual texts: Representational Meanings Interactive Meanings Compositional Meanings Colours - are the colours used within the text symbolic? e.g. Red - passion, anger, fire, all things intense and passionate Image, act, gaze Information - value - distance Represented participants (Who/what?) Framing, social distance Salience (What do you see first?) Transactional processes (Who/what?) Power, status (angles) Positioning - Left/right/top/bottom/centre margin Reactional processes (Who is reacting and how?) Modality (real>idealised>abstract) Framing - Strong, weak, isolating, inclusive Vectors (lines within the image - that create reading paths) Colour scales and brightness (saturation) Text - Font, positioning, size Symbolism Levels of illumination Shapes Background (contextualised, non-contexualised) When you start analysing multimodal texts questions should begin your analysis 1. What is the purpose of the text? 2. What is the salient image? 3. How are the vectors within the image used to frame the subject of the text? 4. Who are the represented participants and what sort of relationships are developed in the text, through the gaze, social distance and interactions?