Planning ahead for high school photography students

Educators
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Hi all -

I’m just thinking ahead about how I might use iNat with my photography students (grades 9-12) later this spring.

I will not mandate iNat - it’ll be an option. But for those who are genuinely interested, I will encourage them to install it on their phones, make their own accounts, and shoot and post directly. (That way, maybe they’ll continue using it afterward!)

Others will use our classroom DSLRs (lacking GPS, alas, but some with macro or telephoto lenses) and I may submit (or not) for them (or they could potentially upload and post from the classroom desktops.)

For this latter group whom I post on behalf of, should I make a classroom account separate from my own personal account?

And then, should I make a Project to encompass those who have their own accounts? How should I best set that up?

And if I have more than one class involved, should I make more than one Project? (Is that what an Umbrella Project is for?)

Our goal will be good photography, so iNat will just be a fun add-on. But I want to make sure we manage it well, and that we produce observations that are useful to the larger community.

I also thought it might be fun to offer a prize to the first student to find the first verified wild specimen of a new species in our county - or something like that - subject to some outside professional judging, perhaps. (Any thoughts?)

Thanks for any thoughts and suggestions!
C

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I am not sure what educators usually do, but I would not make a separate account or post observations on behalf of your students. Making a project based on user would be good.

Have you read through the Educator’s Guide or about projects?
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170805-inaturalist-educator-s-guide
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000176472

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Thanks! I had read the former but not the latter. That was helpful.

Now I wonder if I should make a Project at all? Projects seem to be about places, or times, or species, and not so much about participants. I just want to track the observations of those kids who decide to make their own accounts. Should I just be sure to follow all of them? Or is there another way to monitor a group of users?

But I still think I would like to post on behalf of some students - feel free to talk me out of it - I don’t want to mandate that they make an account, and some might not be interested in having an account (or new app), but they might turn in some excellent observations nonetheless. Or maybe if they see how it works with a couple of observations I post for them, they might warm up to it. But do you see other complications?

Thanks again!

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the best thing is to set your project up to include only observations of project members, and ask your students to become members of the project.

if you’re not mandating that students create an account, i don’t think you should post the images of those without accounts at all. if posting photos on a social media platform, i would think that it would be important / proper to credit the photographer. so even if you were to post the images on a generic account, you should add notes about who actually took the photo. but if you do that, it’s better to have the students create their own accounts.

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iNat is meant for individuals to document their own interactions with nature, so group accounts don’t always fit well. But a project for members should work well, as pisum said. And if iNat seems like too much for your students, sell Seek may be a better option.

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it’s worth noting that even if your camera can’t get GPS coordinates itself, there are ways to still add the location after the fact, and it may we worth teaching your photography students how to, say, keep a GPS track on a separate device like a phone and use that to geotag a set of photos from a camera without GPS.

you can search for GPS or GPX track in the forum, and you should find several discussions on the subject.

it may also be worth teaching your students about location privacy and how to manage that when posting photos online, whether taken via DSLR or smartphone or some other camera. there are some new users of iNaturalist, especially younger folks, who realize later that there could be some drawbacks to posting the precise locations of their homes, neighborhoods, etc. publicly. (it looks like the Educator’s Guide talks about managing locations in terms of data quality but not in terms of personal privacy.)

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If I were a student in a photography class and had put in effort into taking good photos, I would want to have control over what happens to those photos. If I chose not to use iNat, I would probably be unhappy if someone were to post my photos there “on my behalf” anyway, even if I were credited.

Will part of the class include learning about cell phone photography specifically? Are there enough DLSRs for everyone or will they have to take turns?

It seems like you risk a situation where the students may feel that if they choose to download iNat on their cell phones, they are losing out on an opportunity to use the “proper” camera equipment. Or they may feel that the DLSR users have an advantage because they can post better pictures of birds and other difficult subjects.

I agree that teaching students how to add information to photo data (like GPS coordinates) would be a useful skill regardless of whether they want to use iNat or not.

I wonder if it would make sense to demonstrate uploading a few of your own photos to your own account, and then have a session with students who are interested in which you walk them through signing up on the computer and/or the app and uploading some photos they have already taken. Doing it in this order (photos first and later “here’s something you can do with the photos”) might reduce the amount of the usual “taking photos of classmates and random objects” that happens when students download the app and are then sent out to go take photos.

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In regards to @thomaseverest 's post above, I want to add that it is ok for teachers to make group classroom accounts for students as long as they are actively managed and transparent. This is actually recommended for classes that have underage users or where there are privacy concerns. It is explicitly recommended by the official iNat guidance posted above:
“One common workaround is for a teacher to add observations on behalf of the students, without including any personally identifiable information”
I have done outreach projects with teachers doing this and it has generally worked well - teachers just need to have a familiarity with how iNat works and be ready to curate the account.

As long as students consent to having their observations uploaded, I don’t see an issue with doing this. That said, I agree that it is generally going to be better if they have their own accounts, for the reasons @pisum outlined about copyright and such. One advantage of a group/classroom account is that it makes correcting any issues with observations easier as the teacher can avoid/do it directly rather than asking students to fix. Teachers can also give the group account login info to multiple individuals, and then monitor uploads if they wish.

I would definitely recommend setting up a project for all users that includes just the members and timeframe that you are interested in (in fact, if this project is used for any graded activity, I would make it mandatory). This will make it much easier to give your students feedback, easier to monitor their activity for any issues, and is great for students to have an easy way to see others’ observations, be inspired, have some friendly competition, etc.

There are a lot of good threads on the forum about introducing people to iNat that I would recommend checking out.

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I appreciate the thought you are putting into this effort. I’ve worked with teachers on integrating iNat into their classrooms and these are my recommendations. Apologies in advance if I am stating the obvious. I have learned the hard way that there are two audiences when answering questions on the internet. The first is the OP. The second is someone who reads the thread six weeks/months/year later who does not have the same background or experience but is curious all the same.

First, if you haven’t already, check your school district’s policies on permissible apps and programs. Some do not allow platforms where geo-location is connected to a student, even if the student is anonymized through user name or email. That may decide whether or not you need a classroom account right there.

Second, I would absolutely have a class account to upload observations from students who can’t or don’t want to have an iNat account. Walking students through uploading observations is a great way to learn about the Data Quality Assessments as well as what makes a good iNat photo. Sometimes students can see the challenges of others’ photos (dark, blurry, out of focus) before they can see their own. Obvs, remove any student information from the photos before allowing peer-to-peer critique, something I guess you already do.

Third, make students aware iNat photography is both the same as and different from other kinds of photography they are learning about.

It’s the same in that students will need to take lots of photos to get their shot.

For this reason, I rarely take photos inside the app. Rather I take lots of photos either with my phone or camera, share them to my Google account for review and editing, select the best ones often cropping and adjusting the light. I then upload those. I usually, though not always, use the web uploader. I’m old school, I think the web uploader is something everyone should be familiar with.

iNat photography is different from other kinds of photography in that focus and light are still important, but things like composition, framing, and rule of thirds are less so. What’s critical in iNat photography is that the bits needed for organism ID are visible and in focus. Fill the frame. Crop if necessary. Photograph organisms from different views and take photos of all the different parts e.g. bark, leaf, morphology for a tree.

I’m glad you are undertaking this and I hope you report back to share out any teaching aids, lesson plans or materials you have developed.

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If you have macro lenses, this equipment can encourage students to look at the world from a different perspective. Instead of taking photos of that tree on the school lawn (almost certainly planted there), they can find the small things that others don’t notice. “Life in the Undergrowth” is a good introduction to the wonder of tiny creatures.

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I think it’s important to introduce all of your interested students to the website in addition to the app. I’ve personally never used the app, but apparently it has fewer features and can cause misunderstandings of how iNat works.

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Hello! I would strongly encourage you to give the students guidance around what makes good observations (good, close up, and clear photos of wild organisms), specifically telling them not to post photos of people, food (grocery store bananas, onions, etc), or man-made items, and actively monitor everything they post (and make sure they know you’ll be watching)!

I’ve seen it quite a few times now, students will be encouraged to use iNat and they’ll start posting photos of each other, random objects, joke observations (photo of a fruit loops box tagged as a toucan), tons of blurry houseplants, and just generally flood the site with poor quality observations the community has to wade through and correct.

If students are posting from their own accounts, using a project that will catch everything they post is key to keeping an eye on them, and please take on the responsibility of moderating their observations! There should be consequences for posting nonsense. Teenagers are going to be teenagers, so it’s super important to make sure you’re not just setting them loose on this platform! Their misconduct impacts the other users. I imagine part of the issue is the students feel like they’re on an anonymous online platform where they can post whatever they wanted without consequences, and I hope that communicating an expectation of good conduct and a promise of oversight will help. Good luck!

There’s a useful guide here if you haven’t already read it: https://inaturalist.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170805

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I don’t mind silly observations that can easily be flagged as casual as much as 35 posts about the same thing from slightly different angles taken within 5 minutes of each other that all meet the criteria of a research grade observation (though sometimes with 35 wrong initial ID’s). It’d be good to think of ways to encourage students to look for different things.

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