One way to enhance the experience is to help students learn about some of the animals they might see on their trip. Fortunately, the presentation app Haiku Deck makes it easy to create a field guide. Not only does it have an excellent photo search engine, but it is searching for images with Creative Commons licenses and it imports the credits with the photos.
To prepare for the lesson, I searched the internet for lists of animals sighted in those locations. List in hand I then went into Haiku Deck to see which animals were in their Creative Commons image search engine. Many of the Sungei Buloh animals were in there. Fewer of the MacRitchie animals were but we still ended up with good list. You can view the lists here:
This is an open ended project. All students successfully completed at least a few pages before the end of the class. Students with their own iPads or computer access at home are able to login from there to continue working. Although we did not assign it as homework, many students continued to work outside of school. Some students had 30-60 pages in their field guide by the time they went on their field trip. We were only looking for photos but some students went on to research some of the animals and added additional information to their slides.
Vinya’s Field Guide – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
We were able to teach students some tips to increase their efficiency. For example, after they typed or dictated the animal’s name onto a slide, they copied the name and pasted it into the photo engine rather than taking the time to retype. Another time saver was copying a slide rather than setting each slide up from scratch.
Andy’s Animals – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
This lesson also gave us the chance to talk about checking accuracy of search results. What should you do if you search for photos and they don’t all look like the same bird? Why might it look different? Does the female have different markings than the male? Do the younger birds not have the same plumage as the adults? Is the picture mis-labeled? How can we check?
As teachers, we spot checked to help ensure their photos were correct. This gave us many teachable moments. For example, one child’s Chinese Egret slide had a photo of a swan. We were able to discuss the different diets of the birds and how that led to different beak types which help us identify which photo is correct.
Although students bring their iPads with on field trips, they did not use the field guides on the trip. However, making the field guide ahead of time made them much more aware of the animals and teachers reported that kids were much more tuned in as they hiked.