Category Archives: Online Ocean Science Education Resources

Have you wondered about Seek? A Review of the Seek App

by Aimee Bonanno

Seek by iNaturalist is a fun, safe way to engage kids and beginners in exploring local biodiversity with an interface half way between game and citizen science. Seek does not collect, use, or disclose personal information. Geo location is blurred so exact location of street name, even city is not identifiable. It also does not generate or share information with iNaturalist, but it does get information from iNaturalist. If you merely want to explore biodiversity nearby, it is a great way to learn about what you are seeing or what others have seen nearby.

To use the app, you simply take photos of the plants, animals, and fungi you encounter. When starting there is a friendly reminder to be safe while gathering your photos. To reward you and make it fun, there are many badges to earn. There is a series of badges for number of observations, and then badges for your first, fifth, and twenty-fifth observation of 9 different taxa. The app keeps count of what you’ve seen, how many species, and how many badges you have. The badges are the game part of it and encourage users to look for a variety of life.

The app uses the image recognition technology of iNaturalist. Once you take a picture, the app recognizes the species and adds it to your collection. A big drawback is that if the picture you take is not recognized, there is no way for you to enter it. Each species that is in your collection or that has been seen nearby will show up as a tile. Clicking on the tile will open more information on the species: common and scientific name, taxon, map, a graph of when sightings have been recorded, a blurb from wikipedia, and an observation count from iNaturalist. For example, I’ve shown below the Eastern Gray Squirrel information.

This app seems to be a way for iNaturalist to improve its image recognition capability and a way for novices and students to have fun learning about what else is living around them. It is currently only available on iOS devices, hopefully beta tests will soon be complete for Android.

   

Hurricanes: Science and Society Webinar Series

Hurricanes: Science and Society (http://www.hurricanescience.org/) will host a five-part webinar series in the spring of 2012. The webinar series will provide participants with an opportunity to “meet” some of the country’s top hurricane scientists and introduce a range of hurricane topics from the basics of hurricane science to advances in forecasting hurricanes to preparing for an approaching hurricane. Each of the five one hour webinars will have leading members of the hurricane research and forecasting fields discussing their research and answering questions from the “audience.” Target audiences include instructors of high school and undergraduate level courses and informal science educators. However, citizens of all ages are welcome to tune in.

The Hurricanes: Science and Society Webinar Series Topics
Basic Hurricane Science – Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 7 PM ET
Hurricane Observation and Forecasting – Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 7 PM ET
Hurricane Hazards and Impacts – Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 7 PM ET
Hurricane History, Climate Change and Hurricanes -Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 7 PM ET
Hurricane Preparedness – Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 7 PM ET

Registration for the Hurricanes: Science and Society Webinar Series is open: www.hurricanescience.org/resources/webinar2012/

The 2012 Hurricanes: Science and Society Webinar Series is presented by the University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography in partnership with the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE), and the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

Certificates of completion are available for those who wish to use this seminar series for continuing education credits.

A full list of webinar topics, speakers, and additional information:
www.hurricanescience.org/resources/webinar2012/

For further information, contact Holly Morin at hmorin@gso.uri.edu
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Online Interdisciplinary Education Portal

Academic Room (beta: http://www.academicroom.com/)

Academic Room is an online platform that was developed at Harvard University to facilitate interdisciplinary engagements among scholars and researchers around the world. Academic Room’s mission is to curate and disseminate scholarly resources, which are organized in over 10,000 academic sub-disciplines. They share the conviction that easy and unimpeded ability to obtain quality educational resources should be a right and not a privilege. The platform allows academics, researchers and students to create highly specialized portals for their subfields. These portals can be enriched with professional directories, scholar profiles, video lectures, bibliographies, journal articles, books, reviews, images, ancient manuscripts and audio recordings.

You are invited to participate in the pilot launch.Please register and also encourage students, teachers and researchers within your institution to join.

Conservation International Produces Free Educational Videos

Conservation International recently produced several short conservation films focused on marine animals. The videos range from 3-15 minutes and highlight climate change and conservation issues. The educational videos are available for free and public distribution. To watch “What If You Were Born A Shark?” and more Conservation International videos, click here.

Conservation International Produces Free Educational Videos

Conservation International recently produced several short conservation films focused on marine animals. The videos range from 3-15 minutes and highlight climate change and conservation issues. The educational videos are available for free and public distribution. To watch “What If You Were Born A Shark?” and more Conservation International videos, click here.

NERACOOS Announces E-Newsletter and New Website

The Northeast Regional Association of Coastal and Ocean Observing Systems published their first e-newsletter a few days after the start of the new year. The e-newsletter comes on the heels of the brand new NERACOOS website. The redesigned look will highlight NERACOOS activities, partners, work, and upcoming events. With the launch of the new NERACOOS website that incorporates much of the content from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS), GoMOOS’ existing site will go offline in the coming months.

Visit the new website http://www.neracoos.org/ and sign up for the e-newsletter while you’re there!

EOL Google Earth Tours – Biodiversity on the Move!

EOL Google Earth Tours – Biodiversity on the Move!

Atlantic Public Media and Eduardo Garcia Milagros were granted a Google Earth Developer Grant to produce “One Species at a Time: Stories of Biodiversity on the Move, with the Encyclopedia of Life”, in Google Earth narrated tours. Narrated by our podcast host Ari Daniel Shapiro, these tours are available as videos and Google Earth kmz files.

View all of the EOL Google Earth Tours

EOL Google Earth Tours – Biodiversity on the Move!

EOL Google Earth Tours – Biodiversity on the Move!

Atlantic Public Media and Eduardo Garcia Milagros were granted a Google Earth Developer Grant to produce “One Species at a Time: Stories of Biodiversity on the Move, with the Encyclopedia of Life”, in Google Earth narrated tours. Narrated by our podcast host Ari Daniel Shapiro, these tours are available as videos and Google Earth kmz files.

View all of the EOL Google Earth Tours

Interactive Ocean Site Goes Live

The Blu, a new interactive ocean-focused website recently went live and is offering invitations to access the site in its beta form. As the website states The Blu’s mission is “to create the ocean on the web as a globally shared media experience. It is a beautiful interactive online world where every species and habitat is a unique work of art created by digital artists and developers around the world. The Blu is a geosocial web application where people connect across the Internet and explore a vast ocean on the web.” To learn more about The Blu and request an invite for the site, go here.

Additionally, Dr. Sylvia Earle, who spoke during NEOSEC’s 2010 Ocean Literacy Summit events, recently joined the Board of Advisors at The Blu. Dr. Earle is an oceanographer and a National Geographic Explorer in-residence. To read more about her work click here.

Many Learning Pathways in the Ocean Sciences: Webinar Archives Online!

Many Learning Pathways in the Ocean Sciences:
Webinar Archives Online Now!

This pilot series highlighted ocean scientists sharing successful strategies for increasing diversity in their community. Using concept map-focused presentations, speakers discussed career paths in the context of their experience being an under-represented minority (URM) in the sciences, and/or their experience providing mentorship to URMs.

• Webinar I – Pathways of Support (Christina De La Rocha, Phil Bell & Carrie Tzou)
• Webinar II – Why do we Mentor? (Brian Bingham & Ashanti Johnson)
• Webinar III – Sustained Mentoring Communities (Sharon Ziegler-Chong & Noelani Puniwai)
• Webinar IV – Graduate Student Engagement in Education & Outreach (Lonnie Gonsavles, Carrie Tzou & Blakely Tsurusaki)

In Pathways Archives, you have access to:
• Webinar videos
• Interactive concept maps created by the scientist presenters
• Related resources and professional literature

Want email alerts about future Pathways webinars? (Click here)