Great interactive Science app for classification!

The children were very eager to participate in our next lesson on Plant Life-Cycles with the understanding that they would be able to use the Classify it! interactive app. Great tool!

I have tried it with students from Pk to 6th grade, and they loved it. It has multiple levels that should help with differentiation. It can be as simple as animals vs non-animals, but students can also learn about more complex ideas like hibernation, kingdom, habitat, and diet. It requires students to score 75%or above to move to the next level, and only a perfect score will reveal extra rewards like collector cards. This prevents students from just guessing and rushing through the task. I also like how you can set up multiple players/students on one device, so you can track each student's progress individually.

I think that this product can be used advantageously by teachers with enough science background to recognize and teach around the sometimes fuzzy and occasionally incorrect categorizations. Here are some of the categorizations that I found to be problematic: Seaweed was categorized as a green plant. Seaweed is not a plant, it is algae. In the higher level of this activity, seaweed and giant kelp are correctly categorized as Protista. As fond as I am of the kingdom system, with everything changing now because of our ability to use DNA to analyze and create cladistics systems, I’m not so much hung up on listing algae as Protista as I am in being clear that it’s not a plant. It would have been more accurate to say, “Uses Chlorophyll.” The category of "living things without backbones" included plants. This is correct, but I think it is perhaps not the best choice, as NO plants have backbones. I would have preferred the label: "animals without backbones". Also, "Living Things That Lay Eggs" was used, of course, for animals that lay eggs externally. As all animal life begins with an egg, I would prefer this label to read, "Living Things That Lay External Eggs." It is misleading to state it this way, even though it’s traditional, because the implication is that there are no eggs involved in the process of mammalian reproduction. In the category, “Animals That Use Camouflage,” penguins were marked as animals that do NOT use camouflage. This is incorrect. Penguins black and white coloration is a type of camouflage known as countershading. Please go to the New England Aquarium site for further information: http://penguins.neaq.org/2010/09/penguins-are-masters-of-disguise.html Butterflies are listed as an animal that hibernates. I find generalizations about entire groups problematic and best avoided. Many butterflies migrate. There are 3 levels, and these comments are based on the first two. Any issues I had with the advanced level were repetitions of the problems encountered in the lower levels.