Snapshot Serengeti Talk

Can I setup a group collection or discussion for a student project?

  • lkrish by lkrish

    Our elementary school ( 3-6th grade) students are working on a project -making more natural habitat for zoo animals. They are researching the natural habitats of animals in different ecosystems. I would like to introduce the Serengeti snapshot as a community service project for the school and hope the students and the scientific community mutually benefit from the experience. Is it possible to create a dedicated "collection" for the school group participants? can we setup a exclusive discussion board for students, so the y can share and teachers/parents can follow up ? Also, is there a way to auto upload user id or tag a set of user ids with school email address so we can manage their "collection" as a group? Thanks.

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  • dms246 by dms246 moderator

    Hi Ikrish

    That sounds like an excellent project! I'm afraid the features you're looking for aren't available, though, and suspect they'd require a lot of programming effort on the part of the Zooniverse team to set up. However I've passed your query on to @kosmala, the scientist who is co-ordinating this project, so she can query that with the Zooniverse admins.

    Re creating a project collection - you could specify a tag (something unique that's unlikely to be accidentally duplicated by someone else for another purpose) for anyone involved in your project to apply to images to be added to the collection, then one user id could create a tag group collection to collect any images with that specific tag. Other users could then "follow" that collection. That way, all of the users in your project group could both contribute to, and view, the project collection.

    I rather suspect the only way of setting up an exclusive discussion board will be to do that elsewhere, either on the school web server (if they have one) or using one of the free discussion board services available on the web. While that wouldn't have the direct links to this project that these boards do, it would still be possible to post links to images here as part of the discussions there. Not ideal, I know, but it would at least enable the kind of dedicated discussion area that you're looking for.

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  • lkrish by lkrish

    Thank you for the prompt response, I have used other zooniverse sites and know they were working on some features to make zooniverse more classroom friendly ! I was hoping these features would be considered in the future projects to enrich the group learning experience.

    Anyway, your project is such a good fit for what the kids are learning currently in the classroom and how much more they can learn, wonder, and enjoy the experience by becoming a part of Serengeti community, makes up for all the house keeping features that I was basically asking for. I am just going to let them run WILD and collect their animal pics and habitat information and save the questions for classroom discussion. This is a wonderful resource and I appreciate all that the researchers,moderators and admins are doing to bring it to the general public. Thanks again.

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  • dms246 by dms246 moderator

    You're more than welcome, Ikrish. If I hear anything about the addition of classroom friendly features to this project's talk boards, I'll certainly report back here and let you know.

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  • kosmala by kosmala scientist in response to lkrish's comment.

    Ikrish, I'm so glad you're finding Snapshot Serengeti useful for the classroom. As dms246 has explained, we don't currently have the ability to set up restricted boards. But I do encourage you to ask your students to tag all the pictures they would like to include in a school collection with a common tag -- perhaps the name or initials of your school? For example, they'd simply write #schoolname for each image they'd like to include. Then anyone (you or the students) could look at all the images by creating a collection by hashtag, as dms246 explains above. Let us know if you have any questions on how to do that. And please let us know how it all goes; I'm really interested in hearing how this site is being used by schools. Maybe we can write a blog post about your project.

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