Can students have individual Seek accounts that all post onto 1 Inaturalist account?

Hi there,

I am a new user and a new teacher, well im still a student myself.

I would like to have grade 4 students create an individual seek accounts which all post onto one inaturalist account, mine.

Is this possible?

If not, what is the best way to use Seek and I-naturalist for class projects? I want to keep the students off of Inaturalist so that i can control everything that goes onto the inaturalist project.

I have created my own seek account that automatically uploads Seek observations to my Inaturalist account. However, i was given no option for uploading to different accounts or projects. Can One seek account only upload to one corresponding inat account?

Please can someone tell me if im barking up the wrong tree here.

Thanks.

@tiwane likely could answer this question.

I would suggest that you create a project that automatically includes your students’ observations. Here’s some information from the Help section:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/managing-projects. Feel free to DM me if you need any help with the matter.

1 Like

I think that would require the students to make iNat accounts, which they can’t since they’re under 13.

4 Likes

At grade 4 all of their accounts should be supervised by you, so you set them up and can control. Children of that age will likely have many incorrectly uploaded observations, so you will need to clear tyem up. As you’re a new user, make sure you can and will do it, school assignments are the reason of many sub par observations, so please be ready.

1 Like

To be clear, there are no Seek accounts. Seek is designed to be a privacy first app with limited connection to an iNaturalist account. If you want them to share their observations publicly, what you’ll want to do is create a class account on iNaturalist and have your students log in to that account in Seek . You can monitor their obsevations in that account. As others have said, it’s not legal for anyone under 13 to have their own iNat account without their parent guardian’s permission.

But I guess I’m curious: why do you want them uploading their observations to iNat? I suspect they’ll be mostly excited about just scanning organisms with Seek, and you can get together and discuss what you saw.

Having students post photos can lead to complications surrounding connectivity and dealing with app issues and it often results in many observations of poor quality that the community has to handle. I’m personally not convinced requiring students to upload photos makes for a better experience and a greater connection to nature, especially with younger students. What I think Seek’s strengths are in the elementary education realm involve it incentivizing students to get outside, start looking around and noticing things, and adding names to plants and animals. My two cents as a former environmental educator.

13 Likes

I agree with this.

For this sort of class project it might be nice to add a running species count to SEEK that students/teachers could download as a simple text file to keep as a class/based non-iNat record.

2 Likes

Thank you everyone.

I appreciate that there is much concern over the use of students directly using INat for quality reasons. This is not something I am looking to do.

My questions was whether I can directly link seek accounts to one INat account which only the administrator can use to post onto the projects or public domain.

It would be so that when children are in nature with their parents/gardians when they are not at school, they can use seek to snap their observations and then I would get a notification on my INat account.

One of the replies gave info on a class account, so I will follow that up.
Other than that I’m guessing that there is no way to have multiple seek accounts under one INat account.

Again, this question was so that students do not post onto INat, I’m sorry if that was not clear.

Seek is designed for people who don’t want to join or log in to a social network like iNaturalist. So you can download Seek, open it up, and you’re good to go to make observations, but they stay on your device only by default. There is no such thing as a Seek account.

The only account you log in to in Seek is an iNaturalist account. The only way to get an observation made in Seek to anywhere else on the internet is to post it to iNaturalist via an iNaturalist account. That iNaturalist account can be a single account you create for your class to post to, which they can all log into via Seek and post to. But that means posting observations to iNaturalist so you’ll have to decide if that’s what you want them to do.

Tjhere is no such thing as a special class account, I’m sorry if that was confusing. What you can do is make an account specifically for your class. It could have a username like “mras_class” or something. But anything posted to that account would be immediately public.

4 Likes

Thank you again. This has been very helpful.

I have created an account and noted in its bio that it is for an imaginary class, so there will be no students uploading false content.
I appreciate the feedback on the use of iNat for elementary students. Unfortunately, my first choice for this fell through and I quickly found iNat. I was drawn to the project feature for the class, as well as the map showing local observations in their area, a sort of pokemon go treasure hunt for wild life.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.