Ms. Guerra has never really enjoyed teaching science. She has always viewed herself more as a reading and writing specialist and actually avoided science as an undergraduate. Her school has recently added mobile devices, tablet computers, to her classroom and she is anxious to use the devices in a truly positive way. She believes that the media gathering capabilities of the devices; video, sound and images; makes them a good fit for engaging science activities. Plus, their portability makes them truly mobile devices even for her young students.
The next science topic in Ms. Guerra's curriculum is called "Natural or Manmade" and is based on the science standard that states that student should be able to tell the difference between objects and substances that are natural versus those that are created by man. This seems to be a fairly simple topic, but when Ms. Guerra had an exploratory conversation with some of her students in the lunchroom the other day, she was surprised at the misconceptions common in seven year old children. Rather than "teach" the children to recognize the difference between natural and manmade, she decides to let them teach others.
Ms. Guerra opens the unit with a lively discussion about the difference between natural and manmade objects and substances. She puts the children into groups and then uses her laptop and projector to show pictures of objects or substances that are natural or manmade. The students discuss each item and then, using a tablet computer connected to the free version of PollEverywhere, enter their response to the question, "Natural or manmade." Ms. Guerra begins with easy examples such as images of animals or rocks and progresses to trickier examples such as a farmer's fence that is made out of split rails that still have the appearance of natural wood. She asks each team to develop a criteria for deciding into which category an object would fall and, after a few false starts, on group excitedly raises their hands.
"We just ask ourselves, would this thing be here is there were no people around!"
The next day, Ms. Guerra introduces the project. Using the tablet computers, each group of students will collect images of objects that are natural or manmade. Working in the free quiz-building software, ProProfs Quiz, teams will create an online quiz for other students to take. Each quiz will included twenty items and, as Ms. Guerra modeled for the students, the items should become increasingly difficult. The students will take turns taking the tablet home to gather images, but are invited to use digital cameras or parent cellphones as well for the image collection process. To make things simple, Ms. Guerra sets up an account in the free image storage site, SnapFish and demonstrates how to add images to the site using the Android app directly from the tablet or a cellphone.
Soon the student have acquired quite a library and spirited discussions take place as to which images to use and how to determine the relative difficulty of correctly identifying each image. One of the students suggests that they "try out" their images, in effect creating a pilot to rate the relative difficulty. This impresses Ms. Guerra and she allows several of the groups to create a "practice quiz" with their images, administer the quiz to students in another second grade class, and then rate the images by the number of people who got each correct.
Finally the quizzes are ready and each of the teams sends the URL for taking the quiz to another primary classroom. When the quizzes have been taken, the students use a free graphing site, Create a Graph, to create a large bar graph that displays the results of their quiz it is immediately apparent which students piloted their quiz as the bars showing the number correct decreased from the left to the right side of the graph. Ms. Guerra realizes that, in addition to the science that she usually found so difficult to teach, she has also imparted some very sophisticated mathematics and technology skills to her students! This style of teaching will definitely become part of her repertoire in the future!