A major barometer of success for any teaching exercise is whether it manages to spark genuine curiosity in the minds of the learners. Modern educators of today are moving away from archaic teaching pedagogy that relies on one-way instruction in favour of project-based and experience-based learning approaches.
These approaches are the ones that require active participation from the students. They require them to apply their skills of research, problem-solving and work closely with each other. They are not about a single right or wrong answer, but more about utilizing a scientific bent of mind and evaluate the empirical data to arrive at one’s own conclusions.
A Field Trip is one major way to promote such experiential learning. Field trips take students to the centre of the action. They help them understand the ‘real-world’ context of problems to come up with their own solutions. This hands-on experience promotes scientific learning and helps in developing an analytical bent of mind.
Making Field Trips more effective with Renyoo
Field Trips are a powerful learning platform; however, the short attention span of students can lead to many important learnings being missed. If only there was a convenient easy way to take notes, a cheat sheet of sorts, to document every field trip!
Renyoo is an image annotation and content creation tool that helps students to do just that.
It does away with tedious and inconvenient ways of recording data by giving students powerful free tools to enhance their Field Trip learning experience.
How does Renyoo help?
Let’s say that you are taking your students to the local Biodiversity park to give them a better understanding of the local flora and fauna. You’re super excited to introduce your students to the wide variety of indigenous plants and even some rare insect species.
However, your students are distracted. They have several things on their mind – the class test that’s coming up, their basketball match next day, their homework assignments and what not. With their goldfish like attention spans, how do you ensure the students make the most of this learning experience? You want this to be a great learning experience, but you also want it to be fun and don’t want your students to be stuck taking notes the entire time
This is where Renyoo comes in. A free to download mobile app, Renyoo comes with powerful image annotation technology that helps users annotate pictures with Audio, Video, Text, and even URLs to websites all in one image. So, if you’ve just spent minutes explaining how to differentiate a ‘Sweet Birch’ from a ‘Black Spruce’ or a ‘Flowering Dogwood’, all your students need to do is flick out their phones, click a picture of the tree and add an audio clip of your voice that they’ve just recorded.
It’s the easiest way to encourage a ‘data collection / data-driven’ mindset amongst your students. Renyoo makes it so easy to document the entire field trip, that no one misses a single beat. The best part is that the pictures, audio clips etc that they collect on the trip can create a powerful resource for other learners.
So next time you’re on a field trip with your students, ask your students to follow these next few steps to get the most out of their experience.
Step 1: Ask students to download the Renyoo app ahead of your field trip.
Step 2: Encourage them to carry their phone and take as many pictures as possible. For eg: Take pictures of all the plants, shrubs, flowers, and insects thriving in the park.
Step 3: Ask them to upload the pictures on Renyoo and start adding Hotspots. For eg: They can add a recording of your description of each Plant, its scientific name, genus name, differentiating characteristics etc
Step 4: Ask them to document all the questions, concerns or even interesting thoughts they have and add them to the images as ‘Hotspots’. To learn more about adding ‘Hotspot’s go through our quick guide here.
Step 5: Ask your students to collectively collate the entire information they’ve gathered into one large ‘Vault’ on Renyoo.
Step 6: That’s it, you’ve crowdsourced the task of documenting an entire field trip. What’s more, students who missed out on the trip can take a virtual tour of the trip in minutes
How does Renyoo augment the Field trip experience?
Renyoo helps students by inculcating a ‘data collection’ mindset in them. The photos, audio clips, videos that they shoot at the Field trip can be used to create comprehensive Content Modules around the educational insights of the field trip.
Renyoo uses the power of collaboration and crowdsourcing and helps your students leverage it to help themselves. The learning resources that are created on Renyoo serve as a ‘Virtual instruction’ resource. This can help educators reach more people without having to put in more hours.
This also saves the monotony of having to teach or explain the same topic repeatedly to different sets of students. Creating such shared learning resources also imparts practical team-building skills, analytical skills, attention to detail, digital literacy, collaboration and presentation skills that are much sought after and prized later on in their careers.
So, what are you waiting for? Start creating content today on Renyoo!
