25 Oct The Quick and (Dirty) Zapper Way to Break Into AR

Last June my workmate and I headed down to San Jose for the 2018 Realities 360 Conference and spent the next three days exploring, learning and trying out different AR, VR and MR technologies that could be potentially implemented into our virtual (and non) classrooms here at the JIBC. Although the tech isn’t new, VR/AR/MR is quite new when talking about bringing it into the education and training world at our school.

The one real takeaway that I got from my three days of sessions was the Getting Started with Augmented Reality lead by Destery Hildenbrand, a Learning Specialist from Rockwell Collins as well as an adjunct instructor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Destery showed us how easily it would be to add AR as an engagement tool to enhance the learning experiences we’ve designed either for the classroom or for online teaching.

Zappar has created a suite of tools to help implement AR into your courses using a very easy to navigate and use web-based content creation tool called ZapWorks, and for the end users experience, all they need is the Zappar App, that they can download, use for free and immediately immerser themselves in whatever augmented reality experience you want them to navigate through.

Through the course of an hour Destery took us through examples of how you can use the Zappar products in your classrooms as well as walked us through creating a few Zappar codes to try out. A few codes?! In just an hour, you say?? It really is so easy to add extra engagement to your courses using Zappar. All of us back in CTLI can’t wait to implement our new tools in our own teaching and learning. Oh! One last thing: why don’t you ZAP it?!