Wonderful tool at let your students become actual citizen scientists!
Community Review for Zooniverse
My Take
Overall this was a really neat addition to my classroom. Students enjoyed doing something that actually contributed to the realm of science, and not just recreating other work by doing labs. That said, some of the tasks were too complicated/not explained well enough for my 8th graders to be able to manage. If students came across this issue, they solved it by changing to another task. Student happily engaged with this tool for 15-30 minutes but began losing interest after that. It did, however, become one of my students favorite after assessment activities.
How I Use It
I used Zooniverse in my classroom as an anchor activity. This means that it was one of my options for allowed activities after students finished all of their work. Before I allowed them to use it as an anchor activity I first had a whole class session where I got everyone signed up, explained what a citizen scientist is, and went over why it was important to really try and give good data. This was done during the "science skills" portion of my year.