62 | JADE
SARAH L TAYLOR
encourage engagement, a pizza lunch was provided, and students
received a £10 Amazon voucher and a certificate of participation on
completion of all of the feedback components.
Students received the class materials developed for a first year
ecology module (LSC-10033), along with a short session on how
to use the Apple iPad ®. Student pairs were then given 1-hour to go
out and identify eight tree species growing on the Keele campus
(Appendix 1) utilising a device with inbuilt GPS and a suite of
educational apps (Appendix 2). To make the activity as independent
as possible and avoid the possibility of tutor bias, student pairs were
unaccompanied for the field activity. Trees were selected to capture
the range of species that year 1 students participating on LSC-10033
would likely encounter when completing their forest field work task,
plus a few wild cards were thrown in to test the scope of the ID apps
(e.g. ornamental rowan and non-native deodar cedar). For each tree
species, students were required to try out the four tree apps and
record success or failure of identification, as well as keep notes on
the ability to locate the tree.
2.2 The educational apps
A suite of nine apps were used to facilitate all aspects of the
fieldwork task: (i) locate a tree, (ii) ID the tree species, (iii) evaluate
the tree ID activity, and (iv) share data outputs (Appendix 2).
Here&Near (Dvoychenko, 2012) was used to create a user-friendly
tour map of the eight target trees. Targets can be viewed on a map,
with additional text and image information to facilitate location of
the correct tree (Figure 2); this is especially important where several
arboreta specimens occur close together at proximities less than
the geographical positioning accuracy of the inbuilt GPS. Students
added extra commentary and imagery on ease of finding and
identifying target trees in edit mode and shared this information by
emailing a link to the central Gmail account.