Sara

Has anyone used CS in an ecotour? We run canoe, kayak, and pontoon trips and I would LOVE to offer a version of these tours that incorporates CS. Through grant funding, we were able to purchase a YSI mutliprobe meter that provides water quality info (pH, salinity, temp, and dissolved oxygen) in situ. This is a great tool but I'd like to combine this with other CS projects for the 2 hour tour. Would appreciate any feedback if anyone here has participated or led an ecotour like this. thanks! :)

I agree with you Alaina, a classroom setting is helpful when reviewing how to use the app. I've led indoor training sessions for adults on how to use the iNat app followed by a nature walk to practice adding projects and observations. I'm in Florida and we have an FWC invasive tracker but honestly, I just use iNaturalist as it has a much larger user base. The state designed tracker is clunky, doesn't allow the user to see a state-wide map of observations, and doesn't look like many people actually use it. Not sure if that's true of iMapInvasives but I'll for sure check it out!

We've developed a citizen science walk at our nature center, with interactive stations that allow visitors to contriubte to data collection for 4 different citizen science projects (Pondwatch, Secchi Disk App, Weather, and our own time lapse project to track mangrove growth).  This is a fairly new offering for our center and so far I've had the opportunity to work with a group of homeschool students to gather data for these projects. The students were most engaged with the weather station as it had many interactive tasks that used tools new to the group. Students worked through the station together and We also have a biocube walk setup around our campus and encourage users to log their findings in the iNaturalist app using our center's biocube project. We just starting to incorporate these offerings and had planned to utilize them for our camps this summer - and then, well you know. I'm excited to use citizen science as a teaching tool that blends technology and time outdoors in a benefical way. I love introducing people to iNaturalist because it's a fantastic tool to learn about the natural world, you can participate anywhere, and it provides an option to stay engaged after visiting our center.

Our center has a freshwater pond that we use as a living laboratory. The accessable area is divided into to study areas. These two sections of our 'lab' have different vegetation growing along the shore, providing a fantastic opportunity for our third-grade learners to explore how different habitats support different animals, or even different sizes of animals. Students know we'll be conducting a scientific experiment and the quided inquiry begins with observation and questions. Gathered as a group, we ask students to simply observe the lab - asking what do they notice about the pond? Students note many observations, including the difference in vegetation growing along the pond's edges. After our observation period, we review tools and equipment that we can use to help us in our experiement. Students have access to large dip nets, smaller dip nets, large and small buckets, rulers, beakers, markers, and a datasheet to record observations. With these tools, students are excited to learn they get to wade in the pond to collect data (i.e. catch animals)! We ask what students what do they think we could do with the ruler - leading theg group to point out that we can measure the animals we catch. At this point, we ask students to think about animal size and what that might mean for survival. Is a larger animal younger or older? Students confirm that older critters will be bigger. Next we recall how each pond lab has unique plants and ask students to consider which habitat they believe will provide better shelter - asking if better shelter = animals live longer = larger animals? With these discussions we work with students to form a hypothesis and guide students through formulation using and if...then...because statement. Students collect, sort, and measure animals recording their observations as they go. After our observation we review and analyze collected data guiding students to evaluate shelter quality in relation to animal size. We compare results from other experiements (we have two groups each day) and discuss why results might differ. Finally, we encourage students to think about how variables (weather, time of day, season, group size, etc) might impact our study and follow up by asking students to think of other experiements we could conduct using the same study area. Students engage in full sensory exploration and practice observation, forming a scientific question, collecting, recording, and analyzing data. In order to expand this lesson into a truly open inquiry process we would ask students to develop their own datasheets. We provide datasheets in order to fit this lesson into an allotted time frame.

I really appreciated your use of squiggly lines to represent that the process is not static. Also love that you point out the process, not the end result, is the point of inquiry based investigations.