Brad Gustafson (@GustafsonBrad if you want to hit him up on Twitter) is a principal in Minnesota. I’ve referred to him a few times on this blog before, including when I nominated his blog, Adjusting Course, for Best Administrator Blog, and in my post called, “I’d Be Thankful for a Lizard Named Cheesedoodle, Too,” about a video project in which his school participated.
Brad has many ideas for using augmented reality in education, which you can view here. He can also come up with some pretty cool practical jokes using AR, as evidenced by his appearance on the Two Guys Show.
If you visit Brad’s blog, you might notice a tab at the top that says, “World Book Talk.” Click on that tab, and you will be invited to join one of Brad’s most ambitious AR projects – and it has nothing to do with discussing encyclopedias.
Brad, along with a colleague, Heather Cooper (@hcooper815), created World Book Talk with the vision of students creating “Book Talk” videos that could be shared with the world through the Aurasma app. In a nutshell, students submit videos, Brad and Heather upload them to Aurasma Studio along with the trigger images, and then anyone who follows the World Book Talk channel in Aurasma can scan their copy of the book to see the video.
For an example of one of the videos, you can visit the World Book Talk page to see the video that will play when the cover of Zoom, by Istvan Banyai, is scanned using the Aurasma app.
Brad and Heather would love to see submissions from students, authors, and educators all over the globe. They already have an impressive list of books available, which you can view here. In addition to the numerous student-created videos, Todd Nesloney (also known as @TechNinjaTodd), a Texas teacher who was recently named by the White House as a Champion of Change, added a video for his book, Spruce and Lucy. And Jimmy Casas contributed one for the Carol Dweck book, Mindset, that I have mentioned on this blog.
I was excited to see Tuck Everlasting on the list, a book I am currently reading with my 4th graders. But, alas, there is one hitch in this project. If a book has had numerous printings, as Tuck Everlasting certainly has, you may not have the same cover that was loaded for the trigger image in Aurasma. Brad has already encountered this obstacle, and does his best to find as many versions of the book cover as possible to link with the video. But if you have difficulty scanning a cover with Aurasma (and you are certain you are following the correct channel), then that may be the issue. In this case, the students of Ms. Zeman’s class also provided a video for the Prologue of Tuck, which worked fine in the several editions that I scanned.
If you are interested in creating a video for the World Book Talk, information is given on the main page. And if you would like to learn more about the genesis of this project, you can read an interview with Brad that is documented on Monica Babaian’s blog.
This is such a great idea, with enormous potential to effect young readers all over the world. I hope you will take the time to look scan some of the books listed, and consider having your students contribute a book talk of their own!
For more resources on Augmented Reality in Education, be sure to check out my page of resources and/or my Flipboard magazine.
