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Have you ever been walking outside and seen an animal, like a bird, and couldn’t identify it? When this happened, did you think, “Gee, it sure would be helpful to have an easy way to take a picture of the animal and be able to identify it.” Well, the Project Noah app can help you do just that! You can grab a photo of a plant or animal that you need help identifying, submit it to the project and community members can help identify the living organism.
The app has three modes: Spottings, Location-based Field Guide, and Field Missions. The Spottings mode is where you can get help with identifying species. The Field Guide allows you to see what kinds of plants and animals have been spotted near you. Field Missions is where you can help labs, environmental groups, and various organizations gather data for their research projects.
This app is tied in with a larger project that was launched out of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2010. Project Noah is a global study that encourages nature lovers to document the wildlife they encounter. It is meant to be a tool to explore and document wildlife and provide a platform that harnesses the power of citizen scientists. As such, the information that you and your students can collect with your mobile devices can be used to add to the information scientists are gathering about biodiversity.
The main site for the app, Project Noah, has an education section where you can join the project, register as a teacher, and set up your classroom. Then, you can choose missions for your students to do or you can create your own missions. There are lesson plans available as well as a Project Noah iBook (coming soon).
This app has the potential to be used in many different ways, from challenging your students to document every living organism on your school’s campus to linking up with existing citizen science projects like International Spider Survey. The app can be used by younger students as part of their first-hand observations of living things in their own backyards, schoolyards, or local parks. Older students could use the app to help them classify and identify species they find in their community.