Work-in-Progress—Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Advantages of Virtual and Augmented Reality Technology in the Everyday K-12 Classroom

Abstract

As immersive technologies enter school classrooms, teachers begin to adopt these technologies for their respective subjects. But the potentials and advantages differ between subjects and technologies, which is why it is interesting to investigate how future teachers perceive these advantages. Following the learning affordances from Dalgarno and Lee, the SAMR model of Puentedura, and the visualization forms of representation from Schwan and Buder, we analyzed fictional letters from preservice teachers attending a seminar on immersive teaching and learning according to these categories. This work-in-progress paper presents the results on the following research questions: 1) How do reported a) learning affordances, b) technology integrations, and c) visualization forms differ between virtual reality and augmented reality? and 2) How do reported a) learning affordances, b) technology integrations, and c) visualization forms differ between subjects? Results indicate that VR and AR offer different sets of advantages for learning. Based on
these results guidelines for which technology to use under which circumstances can be derived. While there also may be differences between subjects this preliminary study could not offer clear insights in this regard.