In the science class pilot, we studied the municipal wastewater treatment process (what happens to clean the water that goes down your shower drain and gets flushed down your toilet). For some reason, the steps of this process are often confusing to students, and I was hoping that using a flow chart app on the tablets would help our group of students understand the process better. I usually try to do some sort of lecture and activity prior to actually going to the wastewater treatment facility in hopes that the students will get more out of the tour.
My idea was to use a flow chart app, create a series of boxes that contain the steps of wastewater treatment, share the screen with students, have them put the steps in order and send their finished flow chart back to me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a free flow chart app on the android that would let me share the steps I created with the students.
As a solution, I used a free app called flow.app lite
http://www.appbrain.com/app/flow-app-lite/air.de.candylandstudios.flowlite
to design my steps, then I used a HDMI cable to hook up the tablet to a mobile LCD projector (our classroom LCD projector is too old, and doesn't have an HDMI port). One student manned the tablet and the class worked as a group to organize the steps and put arrows between them. It was a nice use of the tablet! The students could easily move the icons around the screen without needing a clunky computer/mouse. I was disappointed that I would need to buy the full version in order to share the incomplete flow chart I had created in flow.app, but I think it ended up working very well. The students understood the steps better that ever before because they worked as a group to figure out the steps. I wish my classroom had an HDMI hookup; I would do more of these sorts of activities in all of my classes!
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