Photo taken by Virginia State Parks on Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0.
The four of us (Kay, Kat, Caitie, and Brigitte) are looking into ways to incorporate place-based learning into our classes. We have diverse teachable areas, but we’re all interested in helping our students get more in-touch with nature and with the local species in their area. in my personal experience (Kat), knowing more about the natural world around me helps me feel more at home in a place, and better able to connect to it. As we get more and more involved in technology in the classroom, we all wanted to ‘take a step outside’, so to speak, and think of ways to use technology to get more in touch with sense of place.
The following is a list of nature apps that we know of, and might be exploring this term:
And more that we will find over the next week or so! Our current plan is to investigate each app and rate them on usability, quality of database, value-for-price, and number of applications to a class or unit. This will get tweaked in the coming weeks as we talk more about our plans, so stay tuned!