Figment AR to Inspire Writing


Today I worked with one of our Year 3 classes and I eventually had the chance to try out a new app I've been desperate to use - Figment AR.

I first heard of this app after reading a blog post from the brilliant @ICTEvangelist. You can read his blog post here:


The feature in the app which I was immediately drawn to was the portals feature. This allows you to place a portal within your world. This portal allows you to travel to any 360° image. There are a couple of pictures included but you can also add your own. Straight away I knew this would be something that would inspire some amazing writing in my class and today I finally got the chance to have a go with our brilliant Year 3 pupils. But as I always discuss on my CPD and INSET the big hook was what they were going to do with their writing which was to bring it to life and create their own movie!


As their topic is linked to space, we decided to use a 360° image of space. The pupils had a go with the app and stepping through the portal and exploring outer space. The look of awe and wonder and that sound of the collective 'wow' was one of those special moments. After that, we worked on writing a story. The idea would be that the children would write in first person about finding the portal in class and stepping into it. We discussed different techniques to make our story interesting, these included:
  • An effective opening sentence to hook and intrigue our reader.
  • Describing the weather to set the mood.
  • Describing the silence when realising they were all alone. 
  • Finding the portal and describing our reaction
  • Multisensory description after stepping in the portal.
  • A cliff hanger ending.

The effort from the students was brilliant and we got some really good writing from them, here are a few examples:




Once the children had finished their writing, they could transform it into their own movie. Using the app iMovie, the children narrated their writing over a video of the Figment app in action. Within iMovie, they could change the pace of the video to match their narration, add sound effects, filters and as an extension use Garageband to create a soundtrack. It was a brilliant afternoon and the pupils worked exceptionally hard knowing that their hard work would be shared with you! So please make their day by leaving them a comment! 

Here are some of their examples:





Just to make you aware, Figment AR will only work on newer devices running on iOS 11.






Comments

  1. Rebecca9 March 2018 at 11:52

    Wow, Year 3s! This message is coming to you from Australia and I just wanted to leave you a comment to say that I think your narratives and movies are fantastic! The descriptive language you've used really paints a picture in my mind and I think you've each done a terrific job of hooking the reader and leave me intrigued to find out more. What an exciting day of writing and movie-creation you must have had!

    ReplyDelete

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