Did You Know AR Can Be Used to Teach English? I Did Not!

 Hello everyone!

Today, I am going to introduce you a wonderful material to use in your classes; AUGMENTED REALITY. First let me introduce AR to those who have never heard of it. Augmented reality (AR) is a link between real world and digital world. In fact, this technology is not very new and has been developed since the 1950s and 60s. Do you remember the game PokemonGo which everyone played in 2016? What makes those creatures in the game look real is AR technology.

I am going to tell you about an assignment in which we have used this technology. I have done this assignment with my friend Sude Özer. In our assignment, we have used QR codes to intorduce a city. We created this handout introducing the Eiffel Tower, the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum, and a popular food in Paris, escargot.

You may still be wondering how to use all this I have explained in teaching English. Our aim here is to make our students feel like they are there without taking them to Paris and to take them around the places we choose. Then ask questions about the places they visited. We chose our videos from Youtube. We tour in the videos and information about this place is given in the background. Our students open and watch these videos with QR codes. Afterwards, we want them to do the activity we prepared for them. We asked them about their experiences about the places they visited and also asked them questions about the information given in the video. In fact, there were exactly 360 videos on YouTube. I would like to add them, but no information was given about the place visited in the video. That's why I didn't want to choose. When our students finished answering these questions, we also gave them homework in the last part. We asked them to write about a day they spent in Paris in their diaries.

I believe that it is a very good thing to use AR technology in teaching English. I think students will love doing this too. In my opinion, it is a very effective and fun activity as they get to know a new place and culture and do it in English. Although it is not possible now, a few years from now, maybe students will feel fully present when they watch these videos with VR glasses in the form of a headset. I'm sure this will make this assignment much more fun.

You can see the worksheets that we prepared below. We designed it using Canva. By clicking here, you can see the worksheets we have prepared on Google Drive and download them if you wish.