Since news of Paul Hamilton's first ever use of iBeacons in a school hit the web earlier this year, there has been a gap in time as other schools and developers have been working hard to implement location-aware learning on a bigger scale. I myself am part way through developing an app to support professional development training of teachers with Crowdsify, but it takes time.
The waiting period to see which schools will be next is over however as a major project was announced last week involving a partnership between Australia's largest independent school (Hailybury), a private school in the UK (Bryanston) and SpecialistApps.com that will see the already in place eLocker software used by these schools to support students use of iPads being augmented by iBeacons in a way that gives teachers a contextual trigger for curating learning content and experiences within an already successful and familiar tool. Read more about it in Geoff Elwood's post HERE.
Almost at the same time we have another UK School who are launching their own project. Titled iClevedon, it leverages the work of a student developer to add iBeacon support for the schools digital handbook as well as location-specific triggers and notifications to make the very act of moving around the school an interactive experience. They are also using their back-end file management system (Foldr) to allow the beacons to trigger access to content for students as they need it. You can view the launch video HERE and follow them on twitter for updates.
So all in all, things are really heating up! Both of these projects are also giving me some great ideas to add to the chart I am creating to map iBeacon use cases against the SAMR framework of Dr Ruben Puentedura to provide a big picture view of where we are starting from (generally just substituting iBeacon use for a previous almost identical tool) and where we are going in terms of aiming for deployments where iBeacons allow learning tasks to be totally redefined.
