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SARAH L TAYLOR
the communication gap to help students work collaboratively. As
Churches (2009, p8) notes “collaboration is not a 21st Century skill,
it is a 21st Century essential”. The Field Studies Council (FSC) has
rolled out iPhone and iPad apps of their highly acclaimed laminated
species identification (ID) keys (FSC, 2012), and at present this is the
only mobile learning platform available, which is why Apple iPad ®
mobile digital devices were selected for this study. Interactive ID key
apps for mobile devices are useful in education, in the promotion of
nature-aware tourism and in projects of citizen science (Nimis et al.,
2012). In October 2013, at the time of the Apple annual iPad event,
there were 1 million apps in the iPhone App Store (Ingraham 2013),
of which 475,000 were native to iPad (Costello, 2014). Carrington
(2007, 2013) related the wealth of different apps available to
Bloom’s digital taxonomy (Churches 2009) to demonstrate that
mobile devices can impact all levels of learning (Figure 1). With an
appropriate app tool kit, mobile digital devices can fully enhance
the field work experience by enabling students to record species as
annotated images, maps, videos, sound recordings, etc.
Figure 1: The padagogy wheel V2.0 relating iPad apps to Bloom’s
digital taxonomy and Puentedura’s Substitution Augmentation
Modification Redefinition (SAMR) model to examine how mobile
devices might impact learning (Source: Carrington, 2013)