Amazing Auras Make Santa Come to Life

As you can see from many of our posts, technology is a huge part of the learning process in our third grade classrooms. The project featured in this next post is no exception. Each year, as a part of our writing curriculum, we write persuasive paragraphs to go along with Santas that were disguised as a part of a family project given over Thanksgiving break. However, just displaying our writing and Santas for all to see was not good enough. We instead decided to make Santa jump off the page...and not just through our amazing writing skills but through the use of technology! For this particular project, we used multiple apps to achieve the end product. This is a technique called app smashing which allows us to bring a one-dimensional, paper image of Santa to life.

As stated above, students were first asked to disguise a printed-form of Santa in a way that he wouldn’t be recognized as himself. Once we’d finished with our decorations and/or embellishments, we then learned about persuasive writing, with each student writing a persuasive paragraph to convince their reader that their colored image of Santa was, in fact, not Santa. Next, we applied an app called “Yak It” in order to make our disguised Santa figures talk. The video outcome of this was then created as an overlay to their actual Santa image, using the “Aurasma” app. When engaged with this particular app, each individual Santa was brought to life, speaking to the listener as he—the disguised Santa—presented his argument, in the voice and written words of its corresponding paragraph author—as to why he is not the actual Santa but, in reality, someone else! 

Click on the clip below to see the outcome.