For the Love of Reading: Reflections on my Action Plan

I’m looking forward to our Final F2F at UCC this Friday – sharing some updates and final reflections on my Action Plan, and hearing the same from my Cohort peeps.  It’s been really exciting to share how we all go about cultivating a love of reading in our students.

In addition to this post, please check out my slideshow for more info and some final reflections on the Cohort 21 experience.

For my Action Plan, I sought to redefine readers’ advisory by using augmented reality to change it from a librarian-led to a student-led task.  Peer-to-peer readers’ advisory increases engagement and critical thinking about literature, and eliminates the limitations of traditional librarian-led readers’ advisory (see this previous post for further explanation).  Using the iPad app Aurasma, our Grade 4 students are creating an augmented reality landscape of crowd-sourced readers’ advisory.

As of right now, most of the Grade 4s have finished a draft of their book review and are beginning to film on the iPads.  In their tech class with Adam Caplan, Teaching & Technology Coach and Cohort member, they have been experimenting with Aurasma to build augmented reality scenarios, the most popular of which features photos of their teachers and cute animations 🙂  It was, of course, my hope to be completely “done” the project by our final F2F, but timing was one major challenge I faced with this project.  We had about one hour every nine days together so it was difficult to keep the momentum up, and with so many other things going on (field trips, sports, etc.) sometimes it would be many weeks between sessions.  The silver lining is that this allowed for lots of reflection on the process and the tools, and I’m able to consult my fellow Cohort members at the final F2F for ideas on how the students can share their final product.

Here’s a few of the things the Grade 4s had to say when I asked for their reflections on the project: What makes a good book review? What have you learned about augmented reality? What have you enjoyed? What has been frustrating?

• “I learned that A.R. is so fun.  I wish it worked if you just scanned it with your eyes.”
• “What I have enjoyed is that I get to share with the class about what books I read.”
• “I enjoyed when we got to use Aurasma.  I like it because it’s a lot of fun when you can create your own things.”
• “Nothing was frustrating.  I will choose a book that I really, really like because I chose a book I didn’t really like then re-did my book review on a book I loved.”
• “Aurasma is easy when you know how to do it, but hard to explain.”

Don’t I know it!