Before moving to a 5th grade classroom last year, the biography wax museum project has been a tradition over the years. As much work as it can be, the students always look forward to it!

What is the wax museum project you ask? Well, just like the famous Madame Tussauds, students select a celebrity or historical figure that has meaning to them. They focus on the standards of nonfiction text features, while also researching to discover any unanswered questions. Following their approved figure selection, the students then receive a rubric to follow that outlines the project, expectations and check-in dates. After having a little over a month to complete this, one of the best parts is the big presentation! All three, fifth grade classrooms, invite the school to participate in this experience. The teachers turn into the museum curators and the students are dressed, silent, and standing like wax figures to mimic the individual they read about as our guests wonder around visit our exhibit.

While the tradition of the wax museum project has always been the informational poster, I remember being a 4th grade teacher and wishing I had the time to read all of the student posters as I walked through the rooms. Having had the students previously, it is always exciting to enjoy and be entertained by their hard work. After recently becoming intrigued with the Aurasma app this school year, the wax museum project was one instantly came to mind that I needed to connect this app with! With a mixture of Aurasma and Chatterpix, below you will find a brief description of how you can incorporate a task like this into your classroom!

1. Once you have your project idea in mind, have the students complete any necessary work in advance in preparation for the Aurasma and Chatterpix portion.

2. Find an image of the face you want to use (check for copyrights), preferably a front profile, and save it to your camera roll.

3. Open Chatterpix, upload your picture, and complete the process to save your Chatterpix as a video on your device.

4. Make sure you have Aurasma downloaded and that the portion of the project you want to connect the augmented reality video to is complete. (My students had their posters finished before we began the chatter pix and Aurasma portion)

5. In preparation for generating the Aurasma trigger pictures, I printed out the Aurasma logo onto labels in advance, this way students could place the label next to the picture on their poster that they were going to use. This made the process much easier for our visitors so they knew where to look since time was limited for visitation sessions.

6.  Setup your Aurasma account, if you don’t currently have one. See my previous post HERE on how to set an account up and get started using Aurasma.

7. Follow the directions above to also create your Aura using a trigger picture (with the label) that will activate your video to play from Chatterpix.  I have students login and upload to one class account to make it easier for internal classroom purposes as well.

8. Once everything is connected, make sure your class or public visitors are informed of your channel name in advance. Then, test out your finished product and you are ready to go! Pay close attention to the tips given in the presentation from my previous post, it will help give reminders about lighting and on making sure to take clear trigger pictures. I even projected a reminder information page onto my Smartboard in case parents didn’t catch our links on social media for instructions.

The great thing about this part of the project, is that the augmented reality really assisted our younger visitors! When they may not have been able to read, they were still able to learn while they visited our room and report back to their teacher with interesting facts!

Steve Jobs image from NY Post, Marie Curie image from Wikipedia