  In this paper we seek to contribute to the debate about the nature of citizen
involvement in real scientific projects by the means of online tools that
facilitate crowdsourcing and collaboration. We focus on an understudied area,
the impact of online citizen science participation on the science education of
school age children. We present a binary tree of online citizen science process
flows and the results of an anonymous survey among primary school teachers in
New Zealand that are known advocates of science education. Our findings reveal
why teachers are interested in using online citizen science in classroom
activities and what they are looking for when making their choice for a
particular project to use. From these characteristics we derive recommendations
for the optimal embedding of online citizen science in education related to the
process, the context, and the dissemination of results.
