AR Makr: Bringing a story alive!

I am very lucky to use digital technologies to teach our Core Beliefs (Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity and Student Agency) to all classes across our school.

Recently I was working alongside a class of Year 4, 5 and 6 learners. I read the story 'Once There was a Taniwha' by Joseph Potangaroa, a local story about taniwha in the Wairarapa area. I challenged the students to create their own taniwha, put it in a Wairarapa location of their choice and tell a short story about it. Our Core Belief focus for the lesson was creativity. After generating a range of ideas of how this could be presented creatively, we decided to have a go at using AR Makr.

The students worked really hard to design and draw their own taniwha in Sketches School, upload the image to Keynote, draw images of things they wanted to use in their animation and upload a photo of a local Wairarapa waterway. Once these images were prepared in Keynote, students took the images to AR Makr where they created an animated AR version of their own taniwha story. Students screen recorded their underwater world and told their story as a voice over.

This was a fun way to show our core belief of creativity where students dared to be different and brave, created with purpose, generated a range of ideas and visualised the possibilities.

For many students, this was their first time using AR Makr and it was a very motivating app that achieved some very creative results!

Here is a model of what was achieved.