Archived Teacher's Guide

This is an archived version of iNaturalist's Teacher's Guide.

The current official iNaturalist Educator's Guide can now be found at iNaturalist Help.

iNat might seem like the perfect blend of science and mobile technology, but too often it gets misused in the classroom despite the best of intentions. As a result, iNat gets a flood of poor observations, copyright violations, and offensive content. And often, the students participating don't have a good experience.

We find that iNaturalist works best when people want to use it, not when they're required to use it.

If you think you want to use iNaturalist with your students, please carefully read this guide, which goes over potential legal issues, common pitfalls, and best practices.

Use iNaturalist Yourself

Try to add 20-30+ observations before considering how you will use iNaturalist with your students. iNat will make a lot more sense to you after some firsthand experience. This can be as simple as using the app on a short hike or a walk around your block, or better yet, try to use it at a place and time that are similar to where and when you are expecting your students to use it. Please don't just install the app, make an observation of your dog, and think that you are sufficiently prepared.

Consider Using the "Seek by iNaturalist" App for Your Students Instead

Check out Seek by iNaturalist which is an fun, privacy-focused and gamified app that provides live ID suggestions. It may be a better fit for your class than iNaturalist because it doesn't actually post observations to iNaturalist, but still provides some tools such as automated species identification and nature journaling. While the iNaturalist app is rated 4+ on the app stores, that assumes that teachers use a classroom log-in or acquire parental permission before students sign in since you otherwise must be 13+ to create an account. We instead recommend Seek as the easier alternative for young beginner naturalists.

Download the Seek User Guide

First Explore Existing Observations

Before your class adds any data, explore what has been observed in your area. iNaturalist already has the boundaries for every country in the world, and two administrative levels below that (e.g. for the United States, iNaturalist also has all state and county level boundaries). You can reference these tutorials (web, video) about exploring observations. Use the nearby observations to reflect on what has been recorded, why, and what makes for good documentation.

Consider using field guides, sketching, and hands-on exploration rather than a smart device

While it may sound quaint or old fashioned, consider having your students (especially those in elementary school) take a break from screens and instead get their hands dirty looking for bugs, worms, and weeds, then sketch what they've found and/or look them up in picture books or field guides. Learning to sketch an animal or plant is a great way to sharpen observation skills and really get to know an organism.

Be Sure to Make Useful Observations

If some of your goals are for your students to get some identification help, to engage in discussions with the iNaturalist community, and to make observations that are valuable to others, here are a few useful pointers:

Be the Steward of Your Class's Data

Since most students use iNat under duress, they are often not responsive to comments and identifications from the community, and often don't respond to data quality issues (wrong coordinates, copyright infringements, etc.). Some members of the iNat community find this frustrating, so we'd appreciate it if you could take responsibility for these issues by looking over all the contributions from your class and following these best practices:

Test Test Test / How to Test Your Own Protocols

You definitely don't want to learn how to use iNat at the same time as your students, so make sure that you test out your protocols before teaching them to others. That means test out the following: recording observations, adding comments, and adding identifications.

As a part of your testing and as part of your students' learning curve, you will all inevitably want to make some test observations of subjects that are easy and close at hand, such as pets or a house plants, but you'll get far more out of your test observations if you follow these guidelines:

Children and the Law

Teachers working with younger kids need to keep in mind that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 means we can't allow people under the age of 13 in the United States to create accounts without parental approval. This restriction is also reflected in our Terms of Service. As of June 2019, we do have a pathway for parental approval for accounts of children under 13, but it requires a small donation to verify identity.

One common workaround is for a teacher to add observations on behalf of the students, without including any personally identifiable information. Rockburn Elementary School teachers set up anonymous, general accounts that students were able to use to record data, but these accounts were administered by the teachers. If you go this route, make sure you take responsibility for the general accounts that you create for use by underage students. For younger children, please consider using Seek instead (see above).

Also, iNaturalist will not enter into contracts with individual school districts regarding the use of iNaturalist or Seek by iNaturalist, nor do we fill out privacy forms or applications for school districts. So if your school district requires an agreement or information beyond what we have specified in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy before using iNaturalist, then iNaturalist is not the choice for your classroom.

Class Bioblitzes and Projects on iNaturalist

Many educators organize bioblitzes and/or create projects for their students. Please be aware that creating new iNaturalist places (e.g. a local park or schoolyard) or a Traditional project requires that your account have at least 50 verifiable observations. For more information about those topics, please refer to Managing Projects.

Teach Students About Copyright / Require Them to Post Their Own Photos

One of the most frequent problems we have with classroom participants is that students and more importantly teachers often fail to understand that iNaturalist is for posting your own photos from nature, and that those photos should be evidence of your encounters with living things. They should not simply be photos copied from books or the internet to illustrate the kind of thing that was observed. Copying photos is almost always a violation of copyright law (it certainly is in the US), and is not what iNat photos are for. Be aware that accounts that have multiple copyright infringements may be suspended, and then you'll have to contact help@inaturalist.org to reinstate it.

So at a bare minimum, please tell your students to post their own photos and not arbitrary photos from the web. You could also use this as an opportunity to teach them about copyright and proper attribution when reusing other people's creative works. It's perfectly ok to post iNat observations that don't have a photo.

We recommend that you not have your students include an identification card in their photos in order to prove they're not plagiarized. iNaturalist observations are viewable by anyone on the internet, and identification cards and passports contain sensitive information which can be exploited for nefarious purposes. If you don't feel you can trust your students to submit their own images, then iNaturalist may not be a good fit for them.

Examples

Here are a few notable examples of iNat tutorials and use in the classroom, including coursework, lesson plans, and protocols:

Note to site curators: please feel free to fill this page out with other examples or attach relevant documents!

Revised on July 17, 2024 04:43 AM by tiwane tiwane
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