Collaborative nature inquiry with smart phones
From Shareideas
In ECOL research project smart phones were tested with a 12-year-old primary school students studying at camp school at Isosyöte, a natural park in Northern Finland. Students task was to inquiry nature and share their observations with peer-to-peer flyer application running in the students’ smart phones. Flyers are multimedia pages consisting picture and text. One can create them with a simple editor in the smart phone. Users can exchange flyers with peers, store them in their own database, publish them for all, or save them to the groups shared inbox.
Contents |
Story
Testing the flyers with primary school students tool place in a one-day guided nature trails. The 22 participants were 12-year-old students camping in natural park, as part of their school work.
With the flyers students were engaged in collaborative inquiry while taking the nature trails with their teachers. Students were asked to focus on biology and share their observations with their peers with the flyers. For instance, students were asked to figure out why in one small area of the nature park there are lot of dead trees. Students were documenting the matter and presenting their own hypothesis about the topic with the flyers. Sharing the observations and hypothesis with the mobile phones made helped students to share their investigation with their peers and made them to collaborate.
The pilot was implemented by a group of researchers from the Research Unit for Educational Technology, University of Oulu, Finland.
How it was done
Technology used
- Smart phones
- Flyer application
References
- Järvelä, S. & Häkkinen, P. (2005). How to make collaborative learning more successful with innovative technology? Educational Technology Magazine, 5, 34-39.
External links
|
|
