Extra credit is nice, but irrelevant here: as I said, all students in this program were required to participate in the bioblitz and upload their photos to iNat.
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Indeed. Something like 7 shots of the same crab’s claw on a piece of wood.
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In thinking about it, in the long-run, getting an entire class involved even though many (most?) may be unmotivated might actually have a silver lining, albeit not one that immediately helps the research aims of iNat. It creates awareness of the app and its purpose and, ultimately, even a few of these unmotivated students may revisit the site a bit more attentively.
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Yes. Those poor quality, near duplicate, uninteresting class photos seem a necessary evil, to me. They’re well worth bitching about! However, for some kids, those projects will, we can hope, be a useful introduction to nature (and maybe iNaturalist) and that can make it worthwhile.
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At the risk of having my comments lost in what seems to have triggered great interest, can I submit a different perspective?
I have spent more time learning at post high school levels, but never in the sciences. Over fifty years ago, I was able to exempt the required science and math courses because I was able to test out.
Yes, that was a different day, particularly for women. I did have an excellent biology course in high school from a teacher who could not, in her day, aspire to teaching or as a researcher at the university level.
In retirement, unscheduled and free, my husband and I took to finding what interested us both since our time together was going to either make or break the marriage. Kayaking it was, and this was our ticket to where kayaks can go (and hiking trails and motorized boats cannot go). Even when there was not a continuous flow of navigable water (one learned to portage), the unexplored was there for us to become young again and to see the world as children.
Before inaturalist, we enrolled in the Florida Master Naturalist program which was indispensable to our understanding of what we were experiencing as we kayaked. Our 3 group projects toward certification was to develop a blog site on the flowering plants of a small creek (3.75 miles long). After our certification, we continued observing and posting because we noticed the phenology of this creek changed and thought some documentation (at least for our use) might be worth our time. (I’ve switched to posting on inaturalist because it does so much more.)
This interest well with our other major interest, of getting children and parents into wild places (not manicured parks), primitive camping and, yes, kayaking. We realized that parents, themselves are nature deprived, not just children. And, woefully, we find that many teachers are afraid of nature in the wild (specifically snakes and alligators in our area). Growth and development have destroyed the capacity of nature to adjust to natural disasters, so for Florida having an enclave of people who will become stewards of our natural areas is essential. With another home in Alberta, we see the same conflict there.
Our local chapter of Audubon is working at one of our Title I schools (low income, free meals for children) with an after-school hands-on program for younger children. The volunteers have interested some teachers who have requested to observe and learn.
In some of ours schools with children most deprived of nature experiences, the teachers are also nature-deprived. Understand, it is not that they are careless. They just don’t have the exposure. I taught in Harlem many years ago and the intermediate school I worked at had no windows! I walked to that school from Riverside Heights and I passed no trees once I got on 125th street. But sadly, even here in our rural, heavily wooded and wild with possibilities county, defined on the east and west by two major rivers, there are many teachers who would not step into a lawn which has not been recently mowed.
Would it be possible to set up a technical assistance team to work one on one with individual teachers who wish to use inaturalist as a way to interest children. My husband is on the board of a local foundation which primary initiative now is to establish or help establish a forest school in our region. The underlying assumption is that all human beings innately know to make connections from birth and children thrust into forests will learn to teach themselves (not be taught to “properly” discriminate) as their situations call for it. Essential to forest schools is to encourage the risk-reward aspects of life itself from a very early age (climbing trees, for instance), ad hoc collaboration to accomplish a task, to value aloneness, when needed. The focus is self-learning, not programmed teaching which can come later on a better platform of self-capacity to learn.
The point here is, teachers also need to have to discover and to learn. Look at the teacher, here, bereft of nature exposure, as a child. There is nothing more personally satisfying than a “eureka” moment, when suddenly all the loose and disparate observations finally make sense. Those who mentor adults this way, enable the joy of discover to their peers. This can be so rewarding.
While I value very much the experts who have taken time to point out what I failed to see or did not know or even now, with a mind full unconnected data, not remembered as cogent to an observation, I ask that they also use the same patience toward me, to help an essential group who are gatekeepers to experiences in the wild for children. My lifetime is linear: the possibilities of a teacher is richly dimensional.
Perhaps working through non-science based areas, like teacher’s unions or associations, at regional and national conferences; state departments of education, a project funded by the US government called Project Wild with funds sent to state programs, one might combine the potential of inaturalist into already existing organizations to enhance their missions.
Don’t exclude, inclue. Remember that even a teacher who makes even a disastrous entry as precipitated this concern, is an entry to hundreds of children. That teacher has done something outside of his safe curriculum guidelines. At a time when teachers are finding restrictions and guidelines and pay dependent on test results, that teacher is willing to risk something different. Mentored and helped, the possibilities for exposing children to nature is immense.
I initially balked at the thought that anyone could confirm any observation – the populist approach to acceptance, but this does not bother me any more. There are sufficient knowledgeable people willing willing to educate and explain why prior confirmations were not accurate. It’s this democratic approach (yes, in the forum seems to be the basis of many concerns) which, I believe, has made this website popular and accessible. It is why I feel confident in talking up inaturalist to other kayakers and those who work with children and for retirees (particularly with their grandchildren). I feel anyone, my grandchildren, a clueless male paddler who only talks of flowers by color, if he even sees them, and even an agency director who won’t step on anything not wood, cement or asphalt. I caution them to be patient about getting an immediate confirmation or all their postings confirmed., for I know that others will treat them kindly.
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[Standing ovation]
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For me I think the nature of a Bioblitz, where quantity is the driving force, leads to the multiple images of the same plant and, when done on the confines of a school campus, may not result in connecting students with wild nature while tending to lead to large quantities of suboptimal observations. I have students using iNaturalist in my ethnobotany course, but they are making single, topic focused observations during the term. I follow my students both on iNaturalist and via a link, an approach that ensures I see all of their observations. I have the students use the Notes field to make ethnobotanical notes on the uses of the plant in the observation. I then populate the Observation Fields.
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As a former college professor and former non-profit executive director who taught at all educational levels (including “Mommy and Me” nature-based classes at national wildlife refuges), I would encourage the iNaturalist.org staff to put some educational modules on the iNat website for teachers to use. These should include some tips about how to teach young children vs. teens to use cameras and computers to post their best photos as iNat observations, and to NOT allow children to upload 100s of photos in a sequence, etc. Many of the tips I have seen other Users give in iNatForum to those of us who are already Users could be used for this purpose as well. I applaud the teachers who are trying to introduce their students to living organisms and iNaturalist.org. iNat should do everything possible to help these teachers be more effective with their educational efforts.
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iNat does provide a Teacher’s Guide (same link as earlier posts above) which has many suggestions/guidelines for using iNat with students.
I will note that young children (<13) are not allowed to have their own iNat accounts, so I don’t think there would be many resources specifically for that age group since they shouldn’t be encouraged to use iNat on their own. Seek was created in part to provide an option for children under 13, so that is often a better option for them.
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And to your and their credit, those are most of the plant observations for Federated States of Micronesia.
One could, therefore, argue that the usefulness of class assignments is affected by the overall level of activity in the locality.
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I don’t often find the student observations particularly bad, but I have to admit that a series of observations recently bothered me – a group of photos all taken at the same time of a series of organisms clearly in captivity in a small zoo in Ecuador, with the student group moving each other’s captive observations to research grade. I wanted to reach out but there were probably 5 or 6 students involved and they were likely native Spanish speakers (and I am only okay at speaking the language).
Lately I’ve been seeing pictures of monkeys in Trinidad, various species, in what look like wild settings. I asked about the wild vs captive status of one of them, and the observer said wild but habituated. I’m wondering if it might be more a case of (relatively) free-living captive, but I don’t have enough context to make that call.
Wild but habituated = wild, for iNaturalist.
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No, they’re in a location marked as a zoo, photographed through a wire fence, with a fence behind them. It’s pretty certain that they’re fenced in.
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When you run into these and can track down the teacher you are welcome to share this presentation with them https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/1/d/1b1q7qc0UEnBK5ChSJHaW97fdS04R7P6toSf75AmMTLo/mobilepresent#slide=id.p
The teacher can modify it for their own situation and versions have now been used somewhat successfully in a dozen courses that I know of.
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Identifiers need to have expertise but observers of all skill levels are valuable. More boots on the ground…
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This is a really great idea. It also allows kids to see that a rotten tree can actually be a tiny ecosystem all by itself.
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I wish I had knew about INat when I was in school, instead of dissecting those poor frogs, I would have enjoyed a few biology classes outside to teach me about nature and biodiversity.
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Or even worse, fetal pigs.
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Earthworms. My nemesis was the earthworm. (A family member had had major abdominal surgery two days prior. Would’ve served my biology teacher right if I’d hurked all over his shoes instead of making a dash for the hallway.)
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