Learning the Dewey Decimal System with Augmented Reality

 

My fifth grade reading teacher requires her students to complete a 25 Book Challenge each year. Students read 25 books from a variety of categories, including one from each Dewey class. Entering fifth grade, my students have very limited knowledge of the Dewey decimal system besides knowing where their favorite books are located. So to introduce students to the Dewey classes, I first taught them about the Dewey decimal system and the books in each major class. I also showed them where each section is in the media center. Then, to have students practice, I created an interactive experience using the augmented reality app Aurasma.

Aurasma is one of my favorite apps! You can use it to create your own augmented reality content. It is adaptable to any subject area, and students are always amazed by it!  Aurasma Studio is the website I use to upload and create all of my augmented reality content. Once you learn the main parts of Aurasma Studio (trigger images, overlays, auras, and channels), it is very user-friendly! For this lesson, I selected 30 books in my media center (three from each of the ten major Dewey classes). I uploaded cover images of these books into Aurasma Studio as my trigger images. This means that when these pictures are scanned in the Aurasma app, augmented reality content appears. Next, I uploaded JPEG images I created in PowerPoint of each of the major Dewey classes as the overlays. This is the content that appears when the trigger images are scanned. Finally, I combined each cover image with the correct Dewey class picture to create auras for each book. Auras are the trigger image and overlay together. You also must set up a channel in Aurasma Studio. To view the auras, an iPad must follow your channel. The iPads I house in the media center were already following my Aurasma channel. 

Before the lesson, I put ten books are each table. Each table held one book from each Dewey class  I covered up the spine label and bar code label on each book with a small piece of construction paper. For the activity, students were divided into three groups and sent to one of the three tables  I passed out a Dewey bookmark to each student so that they would have a reference during the activity. When they got to their assigned table, students examined each book to decide which Dewey class they thought the book belonged to. Then they used the Aurasma app to scan the book cover. The overlay appeared, letting students know the correct Dewey class for each book. Although this lesson took a lot of time to develop, I can use it each year with students. And students loved using the Aurasma app because it is so engaging!

 Click on the picture below to download all of the pictures I used as overlays!