Question about starting a project for my school

Educators
,
1

I’m hoping to make a project for my school to contribute to, but most of the students don’t have iNat and I don’t know how many are willing to download it. Would it be possible for one student to have an account and then a few other students send their observations to that one student? I’ll make sure to mention that they need to include the date and location of the observation.

Thank you for all the responses so far! Just to clarify, I am not a teacher, but a student in my last year of highschool and deputy head of the sustainability society

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From https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000192921-how-to-make-an-observation

The emphasis is on you as an individual.

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There is no rule that an account can only be used by a single person; there are numerous accounts with multiple contributors on iNaturalist, ranging from accounts shared by family members to group accounts for a class or club.

In some cases, having a teacher create and manage an account for a class may be the preferred solution, particularly if not all students are old enough to have an account of their own. See e.g., the discussion here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/planning-ahead-for-high-school-photography-students/61737/7

However, there are some things that need to be considered if multiple people use an account.

First, the individual contributors should not have a separate individual account, because this can result in intentional or accidental misuse of iNat (confirming one’s own IDs) and the additional accounts might be considered sockpuppets.

Second, it is essential that everyone who has access to the account is familiar with iNat and uses it responsibly. Having a student post photos on behalf of other students thus seems like a recipe for disaster. In general, students benefit from supervision; if they are left to their own devices some percentage of them will make joke observations and other questionable uses. Everything uploaded to iNat becomes a part of the public database, meaning that if the teachers running the activity do not actively monitor student observations, the mess created by such observations is left for other users to clean up; many regular iNat users are less than enthusiastic about school projects for this reason.

I recommend reading the guide for educators before carrying out any project:

https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170805-inaturalist-educator-s-guide

5

You should read the Educator’s Guide, as well as all the other FAQ and support documents you can find.

Use the Forum search function and search for ‘student’, ‘class’, ‘eductor’, etc and take a look at the many, many conversations that are relevant to your question.

As a personal opinion, I think that the idea of getting students involved in iNat is good, but that bringing it into the classroom is often not a great idea. I am 100% against making students download apps and such, and there is a certain barrier to entry as well with that as not all students have the same level of access to the requisite technology even if making them downloading an app for class wasn’t already a questionable proposition.

iNat requires a certain level of responsibility, commitment, and follow-through from its users, making it potentially a poor choice for a class activity as participation becomes a requirement rather than a choice and for many people, particularly younger ones, when something is required the responsibility, interest, and commitment to follow-through is often lost.

In my opinion the best way would be to it into the classroom not as something students are required to use or participate in, but as a tool to discuss things like citizen science, the power of individual action social participation, etc (which parlays nicely into issues like political awareness and such), as well as subjects like biodiversity (being able to actually show them what people in the area area are finding), extinctions, conservation, importance of pollinators (transitions nicely into conversations about agriculture and such), etc, etc.

Don’t make students use it, but get them interested in the subjects that iNat is relevant to and let them choose for themselves if they want to participate on their own.

Once a week, or every other week have a check-in with the class to show them what’s new in the area, or pick different parts of the world to look at and discuss. No need to set up a project, use established Places, or simply use the AOI tool to draw a circle or rectangle on the map to use as the discussion area.

If you do want to set up a project place then do so and use that as the discussion area and let them know that there is a particular place the class will be monitoring over X amount of time, but don’t force them to go out, let that be their own choice and their own voyage of discovery.

If students want to get involved with iNat let it be their choice and you provide the information and trigger that gets them interested.

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You may also need more obs of your own, before you can set up a project. It is good to have some practical grounding before you show the school kids ‘how to iNat’

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I’m moving this thread to Educators – where you can find more answers in other threads as well.

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Thanks! Sorry I’m new to the forum.

10

They have added a PS up top – student, not a teacher.

11

I’m glad you’re taking initiative!
You’ll have to evaluate yourself whether you can handle a group of volunteers. High school activities and clubs are a great way to practice leadership skills with low stakes and guidance.

A lot of students who are coerced into using iNaturalist for a class assignment end up leaving poor-quality contributions with no followup. But students/teens who get involved out of passion and curiosity around nature often become long-term contributors and community members.

Given the context, I’d say go ahead and make a project, but please use sense and caution. We don’t want minors doxxing themselves – please make sure you are obscuring the locations of your school and home uploads. You can probably make a school club, officially or unofficially, with weekly meetings to share your finds or plan bioblitz activities, exchange tips and skills, and onboard new students who want to learn how to use iNaturalist.

My advice from personal experience is to first collect a core group of the most passionate contributors. That’s people who already have the app, know how to use the website, etc.; some of your teachers might even use iNat. Once you have a critical mass, keeping momentum is much easier.

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I think if you can make this into a weekly, biweekly or monthly thing of “let’s get a group of people together and go out to take photographs” you’ll get students excited enough to download the app and be active users. I’ve uploaded observations made by friends and family who don’t use inat before, but doing so systematically would definitely become difficult. Like astra says, a core group of people is often more useful than dozens of not-that-experienced folks that will probably also contribute difficult-to-ID observations because they don’t know how inat works.

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Add “duress user” to the list of terms to kook up.

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In general, classroom accounts are accepted, but they need to be monitored and curated by someone experienced with iNat. If all your users are old enough to have their own iNat accounts, that would be a preferable approach. Out of my own experience, I would not recommend creating group educational accounts unless there is a clear need to have them as they can be difficult to administer effectively, even for experienced iNat users.

As other users have noted, educational account and class projects create a proportionally larger amount of content that causes problems on iNat, so this is something to be on guard for.

15

something that might address some of the concerns above while also being interesting…

think in terms of a “targeted bio-blitz”. don’t just ask the team to go out to the schoolyard and start observing willy nilly. select a very small, and specific group of cultivated or wild plants. ask your team to work in shifts documenting the wildlife visitors to only those plants. which insects visit plant x between 10:00 and 11:00 am at your location? you’d need to use an observation field to do this, but the plant species would be known, especially if cultivated. this would address the concern about volume of data. and the study (because of the simplistic temporal control) would result in better data than most of what’s out there. it may be in your own self-interest to do this if you’re going to refer to this study in a college application. setting up a traditional project would allow you to require an observation field for the plant(s).

16

If this is a club, I would suggest making a club account for those who can’t download the app. The profile would need to be very clear that this is a club account.

Also, check with your school that iNatting would be allowed as part of a school function. Since iNat associates a geo location with a specific user, that may be in violation of the school’s technology privacy.