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How can teachers effectively use smart glasses to enhance storytelling skills and student engagement in elementary classrooms?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Enhance narrative visualisation:
  Use smart glasses to allow students to visually explore story settings and characters, enhancing imagination and spatial understanding beyond traditional storytelling methods.

• Promote interactive storytelling:
  Encourage hands-on manipulation of virtual story elements to foster deeper engagement and enable students to physically explore narrative options and story outcomes.

• Develop multimodal literacy:
  Integrate multimodal composition activities with smart glasses regularly to help students practice combining visual, verbal, and physical modes to communicate effectively and creatively.

• Scaffold technology use:
  Provide structured practice and clear demonstrations of haptic gestures to ensure students quickly master smart glasses technology, minimising frustration and maximising learning potential.

• Encourage collaborative experiences:
  Leverage the transparent visual field of smart glasses to facilitate collaborative storytelling activities where peers and teachers interactively contribute to narrative development.

Abstract

Extended reality technologies – mixed, augmented, and virtual reality, and future-related technologies – are rapidly expanding in many fields, with underexplored potentials for multimodal composition in digital media environments. This research generates new knowledge about the novel wearable technology – smart glasses – to support elementary students’ multimodal story authoring with 3D virtual objects or holograms. The researchers and teachers implemented learning experiences with upper elementary students from three classrooms to compose and illustrate written narratives before retelling the story with Microsoft HoloLens 2 smart glasses, selecting 3D holograms to illustrate the settings, characters, and events from the 3D Viewer software. The findings analyse how smart glasses supported students’ multimodal composition, and relatedly, the new modal resources available to students wearing smart glasses to compose 3D stories. The findings have significance for educators and researchers to understand and utilise the multimodal affordances of augmented and mixed reality environments for composing and storytelling.

Full paper access

Mills, Kathy A. and Brown, Alinta. (2023). Smart glasses for 3D multimodal composition. Learning, Media and Technology. pp. 1-22.

Contact the researcher

Professor Kathy Mills
Kathy.Mills@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Kathy Mills’s research