Life gets away from you doesn’t it? Too much to do and not enough time in the day. Almost done my Masters though! Sooner than later I’ll be back more and more.

AR: Augmented Reality. A variation on virtual reality where instead of whole landscapes being brought to life through a set of goggles. You are able to input a little bit of pixel magic into the real world with as little as just a phone. A more popular AR game (or formerly popular..) is Poke’mon Go. Take your phone and go explore the outside where you can find little monsters around every corner waiting to pick a fight with you. You win? You keep your opponent. You loose? They keep you!..just kidding. 

AR is a term that has been around for a few years now in the Edtech field but is now just making its way into places like the music classroom. With this technology you can bring music, composers, even concepts to life and watch as students jump for joy experiencing the subjects jump off the page and come to life right in front of them using a simple device to capture the magic. I sometimes compare it to the spy glass from the SpiderWick Cronicles movie, without that the movie would have been a lot more frightening watching the house destroy itself rather than the mutant frogs coming after them. They needed that glass to see the magic like your students need a device to see theirs.

Before we get into a couple of activity suggestions the two main places to look into building AR and one fun one. 

1. Aurasma – Love this app, you can build targets right on your device quickly and easily! Pretty much the top AR app in education right now.
2. Daqri 4D – The advanced AR studio suite. This is for those who want to go to the next level and are not afraid to go for it!
3. Quiver – Yes I spelled it right. An awesome coloring AR app that takes student’s drawings and turns them into moving pictures that jump right off the page!

What can we do with all of these tools?

• What about a note scavenger hunt? Have students hunt around the school for pictures of notes and rests. When they scan them it produces a rhythm or melody they have to play before they check off that find and move on to the next.
• Bring composers to life! Have them scan a piece of their well known music and they can see a mini Beethoven pop up on the page and then them more about his life!
• My favorite is the AR word wall. Turn your existing word wall into an interactive experience. Students scan a word with their device and automatically get the definition and a visual example of the keyword.

What else can you do with AR in your Music Classroom?