Cloud Computing

What: Cloud computing applications are online word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. They allow student to collaboratively construct documents to support scientific inquiries.

Why: Cloud computing applications, that can be used to support scientific inquiry in the classroom, model how scientists use the Internet for collaboration within many aspects of their work. There are a number of cloud-computing tools that can be used to support collaboration within and outside of science classrooms hat allow for online document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation (e.g. Google Docs, Zoho, and MS Office Web Apps). These tools do not require students to be working on one computer and allow for the storage of these documents online. These tools provide asynchronous and synchronous collaboration features and other features for online peer feedback and discussions to promote a discourse community in the classroom. These tools can promote collaboration not only within the classroom between students working on teams (such as the ability to see real time what others are discovering and to provide feedback on the discovery), but collaboration beyond the classroom (e.g. between groups of students in different classes).

Research: There is no current research within science education that explores how students use these tools. (See Donna and Miller (2011)) for a discussion on the barriers towards integrating these tools in the science classroom and suggestions on how to mitigate these barriers.

Best Practices: Cloud computing tools can be used by individual students to share work with their teachers (instead of submitting printed documents or digital files), by groups of students, or by a teacher who shares one document that all students can collaborate on. These documents can be shared publicly with editing rights for anyone with the address or can be shared privately for students within individual accounts. Private accounts allow for greater individual accountability

Example: Large group setting - A teacher, who has groups of students determining the density of different objects, can create an online spreadsheet that students can access and edit through laptops or mobile devices. They could enter their data into the spreadsheet and provide comments on the patterns they see within the data. The class can develop class conclusions based on the compiled data.

Small group setting - Students engage in an inquiry activity to explore the factors that influence how much time it takes a maple (helicopter) seed model to land. They use the Google Docs document application within cooperative learning base groups to develop questions, tentative predictions, hypotheses, and procedures. They collect and analyze data using the Google Docs spreadsheet application.With the collected data,  they construct a presentation using the Google Docs presentation application and discuss their results with the class.  Students provide feedback to other groups through the tools.