In the classroom, I have used Penguin Watch from zooniverse.org with my students. The kids really like working with the photos, but sometimes it seems as if there are not enough photos to go around for all of my students (so we wait a week or two and try again!). Field trips (remember when we used to do those?) to a local TNC site was a great place to use iNaturalist, but I hear that Seek (app) might be more kid friendly and attempts to gamify nature watching by offering monthly challenges.
I am hoping this class will help me figure out how to start some long term project with my students. There is so little baseline data in existence about what birds or bugs (both are in the news with their declining numbers lately) are found on our campus or in the downtown area in general where my high school is. Perhaps this is to be done through iNaturalist and/or ebird.
We do an activity about which companies are more sustainable than the other in a sort of March Madness bracket format (Target vs. Walmart, Wendy's vs. McDonald's, etc). The science practices that the students use are research, communication, and fact-checking (this is really media literacy and/or data gathering). As is, this is a level 3 because I formulate the questions and the students can pretty much use any form of research to answer that question. One group compared the trash dumpsters on several days while other groups stuck strictly to internet research. As groups share out their various thoughts, the students can weigh a variety of evidence/data and formulate conclusions. We even compare initial thoughts and later thoughts about the various match-ups. The idea is that it is OK to change your mind based on evidence. It might be possible to get the students to suggest the companies to compare in the various match-ups to make the activity more student-centered. It also might be possible to ask the students where they would like to spend their money given these findings and/or to research careers around sustainability and green topics. However, these changes would take more time and frankly, since these are not necessarily covering more science practices, I tend not to. The skill of being able to make a claim and back up the claim with numerous pieces of evidence (CER: claim, evidence, reasoning) though is one we return to again and again throughout the year.
Compared to many others, I think my map is simpler. In the back of my mind, I know that this fall, my students will not have been in class for perhaps up to 18 months due to the pandemic. How do I encourage them to keep coming back, to put in the time necessary to learn science? The answer is not to be found in delivering stellar lectures or reading our text books. I think the answer lies in creating opportunities for learning through inquiry.
