Design Question

[William Prothero]

Folks,
I’m refining an application I used to teach Plate Tectonics when I was a working prof. The application’s core is access to Earth data (that scientists used to develop the theory of plate tectonics) and capturing and annotating plots that can be incorporated into student writing.

I am adding features that give the student (and teacher) more direction about how to use the material. The final student product would be some kind of short writeup with figures, that presents student results of their exploration using the data in the application. The major goal is to have students learn about the process of doing science and writing about their results.

However, I am thinking hard about how to proceed. It seems the effort to make this app work with learning management systems would be huge, something I’m definitely not up for. Yet, an assignment with text and figures needs to be packaged in some way that is easy for students to use, but can be transmitted to the teacher (who will make comments, assign a grade, and return it to the student) in some efficient way. What I’m thinking, at the simplest level, is to export the text and figures of the student’s work and let the student create a final product using word, Pages, google classroom, or some other application I haven’t thought about  but which they would normally have access to.

I’d love to have any of you teachers’ ideas and/or experience with great ways to proceed.

Thanks,
Bill

William A. Prothero
https://earthlearningsolutions.org