Dan

REVIEW: Brilliant. I love that you are crowdsourcing resources for field trips. Until now, most field trip venues have to develop their own resources for teachers in-house and when they don't have the expertise, it often leads to lacklustre activities for students. Your idea would reduce costs for providers and increase engagement for students. I think there is one issue though: teachers will not want to spend their own money on pledges (unless they only need to pledge a few dollars to get a quality resource). And I doubt that schools will want to spend money on resources that they feel teachers or field trip providers should be creating themselves. This makes me wonder if anyone other than institutions will put up the money for the challenges? And I'm curious about how curation will work? On the surface I think this is a great idea (and certainly a good pitch), but I have to wonder if it will be sustainable over the long term. Once a museum has some resources developed, they won't need or want to sponsor another challenge for a few years. I also have to wonder who owns the content? Is it the teacxher that developed the resource or will it be the people who put up the money for the pledge? I think there are a few things that need to be resolved, but then I would happily invest in this venture.

FEEDBACK: While I love the idea of creating ready-made characters, I think this market is quite new and therefore still very expensive. Outside of Hollywood, I'm not sure who the market is. Instead of creating assets for this industry, I would love to see a character creation engine developed so that others can create their own characters suing your software. It could even come with some stock characters that you've developed. And you could also sell your design services to those who would prefer not to develop their own characters.

FEEDBACK: You make a compelling argument and I think TALO has the potential to be highly successful, however I don't think you're asking for enough money. The funding requested is too low to support TALO's ongoing operation. It seems to me that TALO is dependent on Ryerson (& others) paying the salaries of TALO facilitators. In order for TALO to be successful, I would propose a different funding model. Privatize TALO and sell it back to Ryerson and other educational institutions on a subscription basis.

FEEDBACK: Interesting idea. I like that students can see which skills transfer between careers. It's almost like receiving badges for competencies. Your app can have a wider appeal that just students, however the challenge will be is discoverability. How will students and others find your app? You will have to spend a lot of money on marketing or no one will know your app exists.

REVIEW: I think your presentation is clear and articulate and the flow of your argument is logical. However, I have doubts that READgauge as presented will have any success due to the fact that it only assesses comprehension and not reading fluency. All of the reading assessment tools you spoke of assess a student's fluency as well as comprehension. To gain a true understanding of a student's reading level, teachers need more than just a quick comrehension test. I would recommend that either additional features that assess fluency be developed or READguage should be rebranded as a clicker tool and positioned to compete in that market as an alternative way to assess comprehension across the curriculum. At this time, I recommend a hold on investment for further product development.

This is an excellent OER from the first group. Thank you!

I looked at Aurasma from the Security/Privacy part of the rubric and have to give it a 2. Student information collected includes their name, email address, device ID, and location. This data can be stored in the US or the EU meaning that Canadian privacy laws have no jurisdiction. Aurasma does not offer a teacher account where teachers can create student accounts and control the amount of information collected on students. This is a serious shortcoming that can cost Aurasma a dedicated revenue stream especially when you consider that teachers can host data on their school's server and have students access it via QR Codes all for free! Homemade AR with no accounts needed and no privacy laws violated. And it's infinitely easier to do.

This is definitely an interesting activity, but it's a bit of a gimmick. You might be able to connect it to the science curriculum depending on what the outcomes are for your grade. And you certainly can't use the knives with younger students! Where this activity gains some depth is in designing the actual hologram itself. Still, it all depends on the task: what are students being asked to design? Can they design a holographic model of the Earth overlaid with all sorts of data from the science or social studies curriculum? If so, then I could see this in a classroom.

Nausea and headaches are definitely a concern. Another concern is how will this impact already distracted learners? I would love to see an AR technology that blocks all distracting elements within the environment (like blinders on a horse) so that students have no choice but to focus on the task. I'm sure that a lot of research on how AR will impact a developing brain will need to be done before this tech see the light of day in a classroom.

Contact lens wearables will never make it into education. It's just not practical. Contacts, especially if a prescription is involved, cannot be shared. You can't just buy a class set of contacts and then hand them out for students to wear. It's unhygienic. And what happens when a student loses a contact? How much will it cost to buy a replacement pair? Who pays for prescription contacts that match individual students? And think of the time that gets wasted in a classroom helping all the students to put on and take off their contacts. And what happens to students who are unable to wear contacts? Do they miss out on the learning? Lol. I can see Google Glass being used in a classroom, but not the contacts.