Educreations and photo sort

Implementing ipads in the intermediate science classroom has been a great adventure.  I am working on using the ipads daily, but also trying to use them in creative and transformative ways.  Although not something transformative, I think this is a good use of the technology.  My students are working on determining vertebrate groups and classifying.   I decided to create different dropbox folders with different pictures for students to use in a sort and then make a rule about their sort.  I put pictures in the group that were of two different vertebrate groups. We started with "rule" and "not the rule" for example, "gills" and "no gills" as the sorts went on, students were trying to find characteristics of vertebrate groups.

Students went to the Educreations application and started a new project.  Under the photo icon students can select Dropbox.  I have my ipads all connected to the class Dropbox account.  Students followed the folders until they reached the sort folder I directed them to open.  I labeled the sorts with generic numbers to not give any information about the characteristics of the animals in the sort. I put from ten to fifteen pictures in each folder.

Students then selected each image and resized it to fit on the page.  Once they have all the images downloaded students were free to examine the photos and find a common characteristic to create two groups.  We would do multiple sorts and students would use the apple tv to share their sort and characteristic.  Often they would create a rule around color, where the animals live, what they may eat, if they are large or not, but eventually a student would find the desired group, or I would create either the rule and ask them to sort or share a sort and ask the students to find my rule. 

Once students figured out the group and the label, we then tried to find characteristics that were true for each group.  Some of these were obvious like all fish live underwater, but others were pointed out and then observed by students, like all reptiles have scales.  Having the students be able to view some of the observable traits using pictures made the learning easier for students and gave multiple examples of a feature.

For some of my more advanced students I would have them use the web search feature to find another animal that falls into the group.  Another idea that my thought partner, Jennie Magiera, added to bring up the level of thinking, was to have students narrate their metacognition about how they are sorting and what they are thinking about as they grouped pictures.