Investigating the Impact of Aurasma for Educators

Abstract

There are many hardships that an educator faces day in and day out when trying to incorporate as many standards into one activity. By compiling numerous standards into one activity, it enables educators to get through all of them from Language Arts to Performing Arts throughout the academic year. Aurasma is an augmented reality platform that uses the real-world environment to blend rich interactive content such as videos and animations together. By utilizing Aurasma, it is one way to address the development of both technology and literacy skills needed to incorporate into any classroom curriculum. A web instructional module was designed to assist upper elementary educators to develop their proficiency in implementing Aurasma in the writing curriculum. The purpose of this instructional design study was to investigate the impact of the module website for upper elementary educators to designing and evaluating an opinion-writing lesson. Throughout the instructional module, educators learned the process of Aurasma to build their confidence. It was designed according to Keller’s motivational model (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction) for educators to navigate with ease, and the appearance of the website to be aesthetically appealing with images, videos, and text. The website was embedded with videos that explained the content thoroughly and to build proficiency by having educators create an interactive book review. Furthermore, the instructional module instilled testimonials such as educational blogs and reviews for educators to see the relevance of Aurasma for their classroom and to implement it into their curriculum to motivate students.