The videos you find on my site are great ways to inform students while they are experiencing AR. You can also include assessments to check for understanding of the material given. I am in the beginning stages of developing lessons with AR and there is so much that can be done. The few 'hunts' I have developed on paper is the use of prior knowledge through vocabulary and picture association. I have scaffold onto those concepts through the use of videos and peer discussions.

I am getting ready to embark on an exciting journey through using gaming as a tool in my Life Science classes. I have a lot of ideas, but I am having trouble organizing them, and to figure out how to start off. I have been looking at a great website, Students become immersed in augmented reality games. This site has helped me tremendously. I suggest you check it out, if you haven't already. Please let me know if you are working on a similar concept in your life science class (6-8 grade) and what you have come across that helped

In our class we use the idea of role play when reviewing concepts learned in class. Students are often the teacher and quiz peers on material. Students will also lead class discussions to explore new ideas, even though some explorations lead in failure. The use of gaming also adds a new element of information in a new context. There are some web based games that are done in the whole class setting. This is a way to readily exchange ideas with input and debate from everyone.

The classroom of the last 30 years have used games that are not digital. By students creating board games, index review cards and other paper based 'games' students have been able to break out of the traditional classroom. I believe that digital games have a fresh appeal to our students, whether they are collaborative or non-collaborative. We use some apps that involve multi-player. By the nature of collaboration one student is teaching and the other is learning. These roles do reverse quite often and with technology it happens at a faster pace. I love to use these apps and I wish there were more.

With the love of gaming, students will take enormous amounts of time on a task to reach the goals of some games. Putting a textbook in front of a student suddenly lulls then to sleep, but put the internet, or a game, at their fingertips, they will answer complex problems in order to say they succeeded with the most points.

One example of a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game used in our science class was an educational game from the Project Jason website. In this MMO there was a process of complex steps and problems, the students were able to document organisms in a virtual reef habitat while working with scientist to classify new species. The students loved it and they were able to put the skills learned in the classroom to real life.The students were able to gain a fresh perspective on a unit and engaged them in that content in more complex ways. This project lasted over the course of three days and held the students attention every step of the way. They had to learn what each of the letters on the keypad could do and remember them throughout the process. I thought it was too complex for them, but I was proven wrong.

I have seen in my classroom that gaming can be applied in many learning contexts. With the use of technology I can open  the world that is awaiting them. They can see a cancer cell developing on the smart board, which gives relevance to learning the stages of mitosis. Textbooks can not show this in real time, nor the latest advances on this topic. Technology makes my life as a teacher easier and my classroom more genuine.