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Logical Choice Technologies has released an update to Letters Alive, an augmented reality education app for kindergarten and preschool. Letters Alive is a reading curriculum for preschool and kindergarten (and grades 1 through 5 for remediation and ESL) that consists of augmented reality-infused animal cards, augmented reality-infused word cards, software, teacher resources, and student activity sheets.

This is incredible. They REALLY took the AR capabilities and built out a robust curriculum. They didn't just stop with what I have seen as a "typical" use of AR (making the image or the letter appear as 3D objects), rather, they made the cards interactive and educational with sounds, changing color, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Incredible!

Another example of a one-to-one laptop program in schools. Interesting to think of this from the standpoints of the various stakeholders, and how awesome is it that we have so many representatives in our classroom alone - teachers, parents, siblings, caregivers, researchers, and of course, publishers :-) Sally Ryan for The New York Times MUNSTER, Ind. - Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.

"No one believes that learners don't need teachers. No one believes that engagement can only be found on a gadget. So why make that false distinction?" Perhaps blended learning is the perfect middle way between the two extremes.

T561 Alumni involved in this project.  Somewhat similar in approach to SmartyAnts

Now this service/interface seems to offer real potential -- it's flexible, it's based on a dynamic interplay of different applications -- it's been around for a few years now -- anybody have first-hand experience with it?

Being a 2nd year part-time student, I already took David Rose's UDL course last spring. My group project for UDL was exploring VoiceThread-- understanding its current feautres and capabilities, testing it out in a real world situation with some students, and envisioning changes to fix shortcomings plus new features. Overall, we thought VoiceThread was really cool! Could allow students to communicate in different kinds of ways (text, voice, submitting video statements, drawing-- whatever someone preferred or was comfortable with) and enabled a growing transcript of student dialogue in reference to a piece of content. But there was a real learning curve- in figuring out how (as a 'teacher') to create an original VoiceThread using our media. And then students had to figure out the interface and tools available to them as they used VoiceThread to browse a stream we created and comment on it. As of last spring at least, I felt it was a bit cumbersome. Really wish it was more intuitive so both creators and viewers could jump right in and get right to communicating. Haven't gone back to using it as of late, but I hear they now have iPhone/iPad access!

A nice framework.