Designing Better Mobile Collaborative Laboratories for Ecology Field Work for Upper Secondary Schools

This paper presents the next step in the iterative design process of a four-year project that explores how to use technology in the everyday ecology classroom for fieldwork. In order to proceed in making mobile science inquiries more accessible to the everyday teacher and to better understand how to design the final phases of the project we investigate how small groups of students' use new media tools to conceptualize science. The findings point to design implications that include the need to provide skills concerning the utilization of new media for small group teamwork along with more comprehensive inquiry tools for the learners to support mobile fieldwork.