Curious if there are educators who have used iNaturalist in introductory evolution courses, specifically asking:
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what activities are recommended,
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how it has complemented the course curriculum, and
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what tips or feedback might be provided.
I’ve used iNaturalist extensively with conservation biology students and students with majors outside the STEM disciplines as a bioliteracy tool with significant scaffolding/feedback on making observations and complementary activities outside of iNaturalist on the relevance of species occurrence data in conservation.
This fall I’m teaching the introductory evolution course for biology majors and I’m trying to envision if there is a way to explore iNaturalist to complement topics/lectures on the tree of life. I don’t plan on having students in this course make observations, but maybe participate through annotations or simply explore data and taxonomy topics.
Open to ideas from non-educators as well. :) The first sentence is not meant to exclude, but to provide context.
Thanks in advance for the discussion.