Posts Tagged "kinect"
Embracing New Learning Dimensions: Follow the Path of Innovation
Success within your professional career is largely a matter of aligning yourself with the core values of your surrounding environment; but occasionally, adhering to your environment and the status quo may come at the expense of innovation. If the system you’re operating within is corrupt or founded upon skewed values, your innovative idea may not be aligned with the organization’s core values and may threaten its very foundation and your personal success.
This is especially true with institutions that are defined by strict adherence to rules, bureaucracy, policies and a pay system that compensates employees by years of service, not necessarily results…. like public schools. The message sent is to maintain the status quo, get your years of service up, and reap the benefits with a higher paycheck.
When this system of teaching is further reduced to teaching tricks that help learners attain a passing score on standardized assessments, it’s time to embrace innovation.
Will gesture-based learning and mobile devices innovate schools? As an educator, I strongly feel like these two dimensions of learning may help teachers, administrators, students, legislators, and state education agencies share harmony amongst their respective values. For most schools, these new dimensions of learning currently exist as mere ideas that need innovators to effectively integrate them in learning environments.
The road we’ve been traveling to get from point A to point B is inefficient; the route of teaching tricks and “guess-and-check” methods is worn out. The means are just as important as the end; follow the noble path of reasonable innovation.
Mobile devices and using the Kinect for learning are just two new learning paradigms to explore; what other innovative avenues have you been exploring? Feel free to leave your comments below or on the K12 Mobile Learning Facebook Page.
Read MoreKinect Integrated with Mobile Devices: The New Classroom?
If you’re looking for ways to further explore the use of mobile devices in education, you’ve found it.
Last month, I wrote a post featuring ways to integrate the Kinect in the classroom. Kinect hackers – and even Microsoft themselves – are now exploring ways to integrate mobile devices with the Kinect; specifically, the iPhone, iPad, and Android tablets. Below are videos featuring the integration of the Kinect with these mobile devices.
How educators will implement this in the classroom is yet to be discovered. This is very, very preliminary but still showcases how educators can further capitalize on the use of familiar devices already in the hands of students. Furthermore, it’s very clear that a setup like this virtually eliminates classroom walls while still maintaining the necessary structure required to operate a school. Stay tuned for further updates!
Kinect and Windows Phone 7 Integration:
Read MoreKinect in Education: The New Technology Focal Point?
I’ve never been more excited about the potential for a single piece of educational technology. This considered, I’m going to make a bold prediction: within the next few years, the technology driving the Xbox Kinect will be a technology focal point in our classrooms.
UPDATE (4/14/2011): Check out KinectEDucation, a new community dedicated to exploring the use of the Kinect in education.
For those unaware, Microsoft’s Kinect is a console adapter for its Xbox 360. The dual camera system will allow for gesture based gaming, in addition to voice recognition for controlling software. It’s a controller-free setup, allowing gamers to completely immerse their body into the game – arms, legs, hands, and feet.
This experience is now (unofficially) being ported to PCs by Kinect hackers. As a result of being ported to PCs, I predict that the Kinect will provide an engaging, cost effective, and intuitive experience for educators and students.
Keep in mind that this just the beginning. Once Kinect development on the PC becomes mainstream and officially supported by Microsoft, I would expect to see software designed specifically for the needs of education.
Until then, here are some ways people are using the Kinect with their desktop computers. Whether you’re a parent, student, teacher, or administrator, these videos will help gear up your imagination to dream of the implications this could have in education:
Read MoreTop 5 Ways to Use Augmented Reality in Education: Part 3 – Xbox 360 Kinect
This is part three of my series, Top 5 Ways to Use Augmented Reality in Education.
I can’t classify myself as a gamer, but Microsoft’s Kinect has me reconsidering after reflecting on the potential this technology offers education.
Formerly known as Project Natal, Microsoft’s Kinect is a console adapter for its Xbox 360. The dual camera system will allow for gesture based gaming, in addition to voice recognition for controlling software. It’s a controller-free setup, allowing gamers to completely immerse their body into the game – arms, legs, hands, and feet. Here’s a brief video showcasing some of the possibilities with this device:
The titles expected to release with Kinect appear to be marketed towards moderate gamers, and it looks like hardcore gamers will have to wait a while before they start seeing games like Gears of War integrate with the device.
But let’s forget about video games from the traditional gamer perspective. How can this influence education?
The Xbox 360 allows users to create their own avatar and Xbox Live subscribers can interact with their friends’ avatars. Right now, the game selections that integrate avatars are limited.
However, with the new Kinect releasing this November, I’m going to speculate that we see an interactive world – similar to Second Life – open up for Xbox Live subscribers. The biggest difference between Second Life and my speculative version for the Xbox 360 will be gamers’ ability to interact with the 3D world using their entire bodies.
Microsoft has been good to indie developers by allowing them to develop their own titles for release in the Xbox Live Arcade. So while there may not be huge market penetration for big-name developers to create interactive worlds for educators, all it takes are a few talented indie developers to make this happen.
So, think of it as Second Life on steroids. My biggest complaints about Second Life – and I think Microsoft could adequately address this – are lack of moderation (for the most part, anything goes in Second Life) and pricing. Microsoft has the resources and creativity to create a model much more consumer friendly.
Then again, maybe it’s too early for all this to happen, and maybe Microsoft isn’t the right company to make it work. The Xbox has never really been marketed to education, although I think the Kinect could be a game-changer. Regardless, how do I see technology like this benefiting educators?
- Establishing interaction
- Meet students from other schools, but instead of just talking, shake their hand.
- Similar to Second Life, but instead of a mouse and keyboard, you’re using your hands and feet to interact.
- Make students do a jig to retrieve resources.
- Practice proper footwork for the upcoming dance while watching how others are dancing.
- Pick up items and explore its features
- Storage and retrieval of classroom media
- Find your teacher’s virtual classroom, go to their virtual file cabinet, and pull out the latest homework.
- Yes, we can already achieve this by accessing teacher web pages and finding course content, but augmented reality approach is much more engaging, and we all know engagement leads to increased learning.
- Find your teacher’s virtual classroom, go to their virtual file cabinet, and pull out the latest homework.
- Logging access & record keeping
- Instead of depending on student reliability to tell us if they studied for a test (which we know all students study, right?), we can access the log history to see who logged in and when.
- Enhancement of real-world environment
- Forget about brick-and-mortar schools. Build your school in the jungle or rainforest.
- Student Familiarity and Ownership
- This is a technology many of our students are familiar with. In fact, I would venture to say that many of our struggling students spend a lot of time gaming. This outlet might breed confidence because of the familiarity they have with the technology.
Drawbacks:
- Lack of access – Same problem we have with integrating Kindles, iPads, and Nooks in our schools. Grants would help that, but it certainly wouldn’t solve the issue of availability for all schools. But if anybody had the money to make it happen, it’s Microsoft.
- Development – Educators wishing to get their classes online might need a little bit of a background in development. I would hope there’d be a “world buidler” that allows us to use premade models of different objects, but constructing customized objects like classrooms would require more know-how. Maybe development could be left up to the curriculum technologists.
- Privacy issues – Public education is real picky about this. Expect to jump through some hoops to make this happen.
- Speculation – This is all speculation on my part. Will Microsoft develop something like this? I have no clue. I strongly believe that somebody out there will, and maybe it won’t be Microsoft. But again, they have the resources to make something like this happen and possess the ability to deploy it on a large-scale.
Time will tell how all this pans out, but as a math teacher, I’m excited about the potential opportunity this type of technology might bring to education!
Here are other ways you can use augmented and virtual reality in education:
- Free Augmented Manipulatives for Education
- Part 1 of 5: Second Life
- Part 2 of 5: iPhone AR Apps
- Part 4 of 5: Toozla
- Part 5 of 5: Virtusphere
Read More
