Lesson #1- Science/Biology

Animals and their Environment

In Biology, Mr. Horchata’s class is studying animals and the question, “How do animals adapt to their environments?” After visiting a local pond to collect specimens and look for evidence of adaptation to that environment, Mr. Horchata’s class decided to create an online “zoo” using the Web tool Glogster.EDU. Mr. Horchata believed this to be an excellent fit, not only for building the science content knowledge, but to develop 21st Century Skills related to visual communication, self-directed behavior (in particular, self-evaluation skills) and use of technology tools.

Students were asked to select an animal that they found interesting. To prepare them to create their Glogster-based exhibit, students were given examples of “exhibits” Mr. Horchata had prepared that were of varying quality. They used those examples to create the rubric that would be used to evaluate their own exhibits. Using Glogster.EDU, students created a poster of their animal, adding sound buttons to physical features from a script that they had written to describe the adaptation of each feature to the creature’s environment. Each student then added a small image of their animal as a link to one of six environment home posters: freshwater, marine, desert, forest, grassland, or tundra. Future classes would add additional animals. Upon completing their poster, each student completed a self-evaluation based on the rubric that the class had created at the outset of the activity.

Mr. Horchata used each student’s exhibit, the visual quality of the animal poster, the quality of writing that supported the audio portion of each poster and, using their own evaluations, their skills of self-evaluation, to assess their understanding of adaptive characteristics of animals.

Tools used in this scenario:
Creation and presentation tool:
Glogster http://edu.glogster.com/
Rubric Creator:  http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ 

Creation and publication tools: 

Glogster.EDU  http://edu.glogster.com