Classification Meets Visualization

Mr. X is a middle school life science teacher. One of the core topics that he teaches is animal and plant classification. He is excited this year by the confluence of three events.

First, his school has opened up the school network for use by students with smartphones. In his eighth grade life science class, for example, over two-thirds of the students have phones with which they can take pictures, record sound, and connect to the Internet.

The second event is the arrival of a set of ten tablets running the Android operating system in his classroom. In addition to being great tools for doing research, using educational apps and reading ePublications, these devices can be used by students without smartphones for the same media access purposes.

The third event is a refresh of the laptop carts available to his class. Mr. X feels fortunate to have these technology resources available. He is determined to find ways to use them that will improve learning and engage his students.

Mr. X has devised a semester-long project to support his life science curriculum and leverage the student interest, which he has noted, in local plants and animals in his rural community. During the course of the semester, the students will collect images of plants and animals that they encounter in their community. Using the online "mind-mapping" software Mindomo, they will use these images to create an increasingly sophisticated map of the classification of these species.

Mr. X contacts a former biology professor at the local university. She agrees to put together a small reactor panel, consisting of herself and several graduate students. They will view a presentation of the work of each group of students, and provide feedback and both formative and summative evaluation data regarding the accuracy, creativity, and comprehensiveness of each team product. They will do this at several points during the semester. Mr. X believes that the students having their work viewed and commented upon by experts will raise the stakes for the students, and cause them to take special care in constructing their products.

Mr. X begins the project by forming teams and asking the students to collect images of the flora and fauna in their community. The class takes several walking field trips to local parks and reserves with phones and tablets in hand to support this collection. As a friendly competition to locate less common species develops between the teams, Mr. X is surprised at the number of students who go into the field each weekend to collect additional images.

One of the rules of the project is that all plant images must be original. Images of animals, however, due to the difficulty of obtaining these images in the field, may be obtained using open source images as a supplement. One class session is spent discussing intellectual property law, and Mr. X invites a local attorney to join this conversation and answer student questions via Skype, a video communication tool. As the images are collected, they are stored by the teams in the online photo library environment, Snapfish, which allows for the creation of free group photo libraries that can be used collaboratively. The students find that some of the plant features can only be illustrated when the plant if magnified. Fortunately, the classroom tablet computers have a microscope attachment; just the thing for close-ups of leaf surfaces and serrations!

As the semester progresses and the students begin to learn about the Linnaean system of animal and plant classification, each team of students begins to build maps of the flora and fauna of the region using the laptops. As they add a picture to their schematic in Mindomo, they also label that picture with a list of key characteristics that they know are the basis for its classification. For example, when adding a local snake, the list includes cold-blooded, scaly, legless, etc.

The first session with the reactor panel is a huge success. The professor and her fellow panel members treat the students as fellow scientists and the impact on student motivation can be seen in the following weeks.

In the end, many of the teams find extremely creative ways to display and label their maps and the final presentations are accurate, comprehensive, and often humorous. The grade assigned to each student is a combination of their personal contributions to the library and project; the accuracy of the content of their project; with the final third of their grade is provided to the group by the reactor panel.

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