I made a worksheet, complete with pictures that I took and uploaded to iNaturalist, that I can give my future students! Of course, I will need to adapt this based on the plants that are actually on the property of whatever school I am teaching at.
Lastly, some of my colleagues introduced me to the iNaturalist-affiliated app “Seek” last week.
This app is an extension of iNaturalist that makes quick plant identification easily accessible (though is not always correct). Basically, you point the app’s camera at something in your environment and the app will identify the species you are looking at.
The app also game-ifies plant identification, providing different levels and badges for people who identify more plants. This seems like a great option for my elementary school classroom! To test the app, I pointed my phone’s camera at some of the plants in my backyard.
Right away, the app gives you a “view species” option that shows you a map of its range, its taxonomy, number of iNaturalist observations in your area and globally, and its seasonality. The information is presented in a way that children in my future elementary school classroom could understand and analyze as part of a school project. I’m glad I discovered Seek (shoutout to my classmates!) because it will no doubt be an integral part of my career as an educator.
However, I do think it is important that these apps are not presented as the be-all-end-all for plant identification. Sometimes these cameras can provide inaccurate information, and it is important for us to also teach students to use their intuition and question what AI or other information sources are telling them.
I hope you noticed my bad pun and realized this post would in some way involve tomatoes. My mom and I often joke that we are the last people that could be relied upon to keep a garden alive. Yet, during the latter half of this inquiry project, I’ve been going on about creating a community garden as if I know exactly what I’m doing.
Right now I don’t have the resources to build a full garden because I am about to move out of my student house and then live in Sweden for two months during my practicum. But I was gifted some tomato seeds this week, and decided to start super small. I found some soil in my backyard, put it in a plant pot, and sprinkled the seeds on top. Currently the jar is sitting on my windowsill, which will hopefully give the seeds enough sunlight to grow. The best part is that since my mom is going to be looking after the plant while I am abroad, I can blame it on her if it dies! (Just kidding… of course).
I checked out this website for information that can help my new seeds get the best chance of attaining life. It informed me that tomatoes are the most popular plant in home and community gardens, and are a great place to start for beginner gardeners. For future gardening projects with my students, it seems like a good place to start is with seedlings rather than seeds. This way somebody else does the work of keeping seeds alive for the first few weeks. However, buying seedlings can be quite expensive, making this a more financially inaccessible option. Tomatoes require rich soil in a full-sun location (meaning at least 6 hours of direct sun every day). It will be difficult for me to grow tomatoes from inside my student house, but I am worried of the risk of deer if I plant them outside. Plus, since I am moving soon, I don’t want to plant my tomatoes in the backyard and let future tenants steal the fruits of my labour! (Pun might have been intended).
Unlike the plants I currently have – cacti and succulents – tomatoes need A LOT of water. I will need to constantly monitor the soil to make sure it is moist! Once (if) the tomato plant starts growing, I will need to buy feed for it. I also found it interesting to read about how the foliage of tomatoes turns yellow-green when it is time to be fed. As this will be the first vegetable I attempt to grow, I was relieved to hear that it will be giving me visual feedback about some of its needs.
Thinking ahead to my future, here are some tips for my future vegetable garden! All of the information below can be found on this website.
Location
Needs a lot of sun – ideally over 6 hours of direct sun per day!
Does not get a lot of wind: want pollinators to work effectively, and young plants to avoid getting blown over!
Easy Vegetables To Grow
Lettuce
Radishes
Tomatoes
Beets
Chard
Spinach
Kale
Peas
I need to also make sure to leave some space for paths around the garden so that I can weed the area without stepping on other plants.
Snorkelling Update
Looking back, it was ambitious of me to choose snorkelling for my inquiry project. One of the times that we went it was very snowy and cold, and to be totally honest it very much killed my joy for the activity. My wetsuit is meant for kayaking and is not very thick, and I think this will be much more suited for summer snorkelling. However, I learned a lot from starting my inquiry project out with snorkelling, and I am really excited to be a student of the sport(?) for years to come.
Looking forward on some goals for myself, I found a book featuring places to snorkel around Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. These will be good bucket-list items for when I return home from Sweden!
Some highlights:
Iron Mine Bay in East Sooke Park! My roommates are actually going there tomorrow, so I will get some insider tips from them 🙂
Clover Point – just off Dallas Road! This goal will be easier to take off the list since it is much closer to where I will be living.
Tribune Bay on Hornby Island. This bucket-list item kills two birds with one stone as I have also never been to Hornby and have been meaning to go.
(Not part of the book) I want to go snorkelling in Whytecliff Park, which is in my hometown! Whytecliff was the ultimate summer spot for me as a teenager, and I would love to explore it in a new way once I enter adulthood.
Last weekend was BIG for advancing my inquiry topic. On Friday in class we talked about different apps you can use to help students engage with nature. I’ve been so focused on discovering iNaturalist and its multiple capabilities that I totally overlooked different programs that can help students identify various elements of their surroundings. Not all students will be interested in plants – I know I never was until moving in with my current roommates. Our guest speaker helped me to realize that I cannot just be encouraging iNaturalist as a way to engage with nature – there are so many other ways to get children enthusiastic about the great outdoors, and I should be attentive to each of my students’ interests so that I can find different technologies that appeal to them. For instance, there are websites out there that can help students learn the constellations above them. Those more interested in geography or history can benefit from looking at Google Earth to learn more about different places around the world. I won’t go on too much about this as you can scroll down to see the list of nature-based apps I made for my reflection post. Technology and nature do not need to be in separate spheres – they are intertwined.
After Friday’s class I had fun using ChatterPix to make some of my wildlife pictures talk!
On Friday I took so many pictures during our class trip to the Finnerty Gardens. I was pretty hopeless at identifying plants so I took lots of photos to upload to iNaturalist. Then I continued to immerse myself in Victoria’s plant life by supporting my friend Christina, who was hosting a plant identification scavenger hunt at nearby Swan Lake. It has been a while since I have been forced to actively examine my surroundings to see if I can identify any of the plants or animals, and it was cool to use multiple different resources (yes, including technology and the Internet!) to try and figure out what was what.
Here is a picture of our scavenger hunt checklist!
My friends and I found almost all of them. See the worksheet I made depicting our findings below.
A highlight of my weekend was learning that the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary exists. After talking to Christina and taking a look at their website, I discovered that they frequently host school groups of all ages for education sessions. Their website for school groups even links which science curricular competencies are targeted in each education session, making it easy for teachers to see which option is most relevant for them! I am still learning so much about wildlife myself, and if I end up teaching in SD61 I will be looking into bringing my students to Swan Lake for one of these sessions. Since I did not grow up in Victoria, hearing about various local options for class field trips is important!
Update on iNaturalist:
After uploading 23 photos of wildlife to the app last night, I went on today to find out that for the first time, many of my identifications were approved rather than corrected by other community members. I finally feel like I am actually learning and progressing. One person commented on one of my findings to give me tips for future uploads, which I appreciated.
Here is a screen recording of all my uploads from the weekend.
This image, and additional information about gardening with native plants, can be found here
One way that students (and teachers!) can apply their plant literacy is by creating a classroom or school garden. I was thinking of creating a class project where students need to choose one of the ten plants in the above picture, which are all indigenous to Victoria. Students would need to research the plant’s origin, range, predators what its leaves and flowers look like, and whether it grows best in sun or in shade. This project could be interdisciplinary:
Science: Learning about the plant in context of its ecosystem provides an opportunity to talk about food chains, energy transfer, and biomes.
English: Students can write sentences or paragraphs (depending on age or writing ability) about their plant. To add a creative twist to the project, I want to encourage students to write a short story from the perspective of their plant!
Social Studies: Students can look into the history of the plant in context of Indigenous Canadians: how did the different First Nations groups of Victoria/Saanich interact with the plant in the past, and how have these relationships continued into the present?
Art: Students can draw a picture of their plant, either stand-alone or as part of their short story assignment for English.
This project aims to reinforce the following First Nations Principles of Learning:
Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors. By connecting with plants that are indigenous to the Victoria area and researching Indigenous Canadians’ relationships to these plants, students are becoming more in tune with their local landscape and with the Indigenous community.
Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge. Much of what we know about the care and well-being of these ten plants has come from Indigenous knowledge-bearers, and it is important that both teacher and students keep this in mind.
Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). As I am learning more about the plants in my new city, I feel closer to Victoria. I hope that students will also feel more connected with their school and outdoor landscape after researching their plant and helping with the garden.
Learning involves patience and time. It will take a while for students to see the fruits of their labour in the garden – maybe even a few years!
Once students have researched their chosen plant, I will introduce the idea of creating a classroom garden with these plants in it. I hope that the students will be very invested in this project, firstly because gardening is fun but also because they are experts about one of these plants and will likely have more of an interest in caring it and protecting it from predators or weather. Following completion of the project, I will try my best to establish a gardening club at my school because it would be a lot of work for just me to maintain this garden. If I can get the students involved and excited about plants, they will feel more connected with their environment and school community.
Because I have never had a green thumb myself, I researched some gardening tips for me to discuss with my students:
The three essentials are food, water, and shelter. (This isn’t too different from ourselves, another example of how interconnected we are with nature!)
If there are deer in the area, keep in mind which plants the deer do not like and make sure these are spread around the garden. Deer will avoid salal, Oregon grape, sword fern, wooly sunflower, and kinnikinnick.
Don’t take things out of the garden just because they are rotting! Rotting foliage provides a habitat for many organisms including squirrels, woodpeckers, and salamanders.
Mulch coming from decomposed leaves can make a great fertilizer for native plants!
Plants that are appropriate for a shady moist site: false lily, sword ferns, bleeding heart, Columbine, camas.
Plants that are appropriate for a sunny dry site: fescue grass, Oregon grape, nodding onion, shore pine, coastal strawberry, kinnickinnick
From my research, I compiled a list of further resources for learning about native plants:
To completely change the topic and make this already long blog post even longer, I wanted to recap this week’s iNaturalist journey. Two people have commented on my observations from last week disagreeing with my identification, and saying they think it is something else. I found this interesting because since I don’t know much about how to identify plants, I usually just take iNaturalist’s AI-generated recommendation. This is yet another example of how AI is not perfect, and in many ways the experience of human experts is much more reliable and valuable than relying on AI-based tools. Next week when I upload my observations, I will try to spend more time and care when identifying the plant.
My roommate’s photo of a crab she saw snorkelling also got featured on iNaturalist’s Instagram page! It was such a cool moment for all of us, and definitely got me thinking about how iNaturalist could inspire my students to look more into photography or wildlife-based occupations.
(The above PowerPoint collage is a sneak peak of all the nature I saw today, in my daily life)
Perhaps you noticed it has been a while since my last inquiry post. Or maybe nobody has noticed, and I just actively drew attention to how much I have been slacking on my inquiry project. The truth is that the last few weeks have been really hard. So much is up in the air for my practicum (which is across the world in Sweden), we have so much to do in all five of our classes, and I had to complete over 60 report cards for my swim coaching job by tonight. I felt like I had no time for a snorkelling trip or cool hike where I could see pretty plants and upload them to iNaturalist.
Recently we completed a nature literacy lesson for our PE class, and I had to observe Taryn, Jade, Makayla and Charlotte S teach a lesson. They explained to the students how immersing oneself in nature can help people of all ages deal with their stress. I realized that just because I do not have the time to do a grand trip to somewhere super amazing does not mean I cannot experience the benefits of nature right in my backyard. A lot of value lies in being able to identify different aspects of nature that I walk past on a daily basis. So, I decided to spend a day taking pictures of all the nature I observed. The effects of this activity on my mental health were surprising – even the simple act of stopping for a minute on my walk to school to observe a plant I liked felt calming. While I still haven’t figured out my backpacking trip to Norway and I have an essay due in 23 hours, I feel so much lighter after taking just twenty-ish minutes out of my day to look at plants and reflect on them.
I uploaded all my pictures to iNaturalist just now, and tried to identify as many of them by myself as I could. Now I am waiting for experts to either confirm my identifications or suggest something new. As stressful as last week was, it was also a critical point in my iNaturalist journey because my roommates told me to use the computer rather than phone version of the app. Using the webpage rather than the iPhone app is WAY more fun – you can follow friends, see your profile, and get a grid display of all the observations you have seen. I followed my three roommates, so now I will get notifications whenever they post something – a great opportunity for me to improve my plant and wildlife literacy! I also hope to encourage my future students to follow each other on iNaturalist.
Whenever I upload a photo, it asks me to suggest an identification for the species. I really enjoy this part of the process because I need to look long and hard at my photo to compare it to the species they are suggesting. Something I just thought of today is that plants are often most well-known for what they look like when they are flowering – but at this time of year there are not many flowers yet, and I want to be able to identify plants based on their leaves rather than just what they look like over spring and summer. Despite working on species identification for 9 weeks now, I am slightly discouraged to feel like I’m still at the beginning of my plant identification journey. I think that using the webpage version of iNaturalist and having followers that hold me accountable to posting will be good for me.
Here is a screen recording of the iNaturalist website:
Identifiers page: shows the people who have suggested potential identifications for my photos. @gracewells and @emlim are the top contributors to my page right now!
Species page: shows the different species I have identified
Observations page: shows all the observations I have published to iNaturalist. There is some overlap with the species page, meaning that some of the pictures I have published belong to the same species.
Here are the 16 observations that I just uploaded today – so pretty! All these plants were spotted either in Victoria or Vancouver, since I took the ferry home on Friday. Next up is to try documenting a nature day that is only in Victoria!
I was trying really hard to think of a possible identification for a plant with pink flowers that I had seen, and came across this picture on iNaturalist – it was exciting to find a plant with my name in it! It apparently grows around here so I will definitely be looking out for Erica carnea.
My roommate and I went on a camping trip over Reading Week where I was able to take many photos, upload them to iNaturalist, and in the process devise some ideas about how to incorporate iNaturalist and plant ID into my curriculum. Tune in for my video explanation!
I put together an iMovie presentation to apply some of the video-taking skills we have talked about in the last couple weeks. While I looked into Screencastify, I decided to stick with iMovie as it is familiar and I already have an account – though I realized I am not as familiar with this software as I thought. This project took me quite a few hours but I feel that I learned a lot, and will be coming back to iMovie for future videos soon!
This might sound crazy, but last Saturday I and four of my friends went on a snorkelling trip. When we woke up and saw snow we were tempted to cancel, but after spending lots of time planning and borrowing equipment from others we felt that we had invested too much time into the excursion to cancel. I admit I was slightly terrified about the cold.
Saturday was my third time snorkelling in Victoria, and it was by far the most fun and the most frigid. Because our group was short a pair of fins, I decided to try out using my old pair of fins that are designed for competitive swimming. As you can see from the pictures I have attached below, these look very different from typical snorkelling fins.
Fins Designed for Snorkelling:
Fins Designed for Competitive Swimming:
I had expected my fins to be inefficient, but I loved using them! I found that I had more control over my feet, which allowed me to kick more powerfully and stay underwater for longer. My movement feels limited with the snorkelling fins, since they are made of hard plastic that does not bend with the foot.
Because I was able to spend more time underwater, I saw so many more things! I saw a few white sea anenomes that I looked up on iNaturalist, and found that their technical name is Metridium farcimen. I saw some other anenomes as well, but sadly was not able to take good enough pictures to properly identify them. I’ve discovered that I tend to see more at Breakwater Park than Ten Mile Point – Ten Mile is beautiful but the breakwater has much more diversity of wildlife. I’m not sure if this is actually a characteristic of the two areas or whether the water is just shallower at the breakwater, allowing me to see more – I will try and investigate the science behind this before I go snorkelling again.
I made an iMovie to document Saturday’s snorkel trip. I didn’t get any footage of the aftermath because I could not stop shivering! This was hard for me to make – I am looking forward to improving my videography skills by using the resources we were given after Friday’s class. I also want to credit my roommates, Makenna and Sarah, for not only getting me into snorkelling but taking some really amazing photos of the experience. Some of them look too good to be true, but I promise they are 100% real!
Over the weekend as I visited with a friend from home and watched the snow fall outside, I thought about expanding the scope of my inquiry project. Aside from being passionate about the ocean (I am a kayak instructor back home, but do not have access to kayaking here), a big reason why I wanted to get into snorkelling was because of wanting to expand my outdoor-related knowledge. Despite being a huge outdoor enthusiast my whole life, I find myself in the dark about the wildlife I see on a daily basis.
I reluctantly admit that I was a Pokemon GO kid- I remember going to Stockholm with my family as a child, and the most exciting part of the trip was that my hostel was a PokeStop. So much of my time that summer was spent on my phone looking for tourist hubs where I could catch different Pokemon characters. When chatting with my roommate over coffee, she discussed how the iNaturalist app has a similar addictive effect to Pokemon GO- only it doesn’t promote engagement with made-up characters, it encourages students to go outside and take pictures of plants and animals they see in their natural environment. We were talking about how cool it would be to get students in a competition to try and upload as many unique sightings to iNaturalist as possible. Uploading specimens to iNaturalist gives students outdoor literacy skills, promoting a greater understanding of their surroundings. Let’s be real here – most of my future students are going to be addicted to technology. Given that this is the case, why not introduce them to apps like iNaturalist that provide a productive way to spend time outdoors and enrich an important knowledge base?
When I first moved to Canada as an 8-year old, neither I nor my parents were literate about the world around us. I saw my peers eating random berries they found on trees and every time got anxious because my mom had told me never to eat anything in the wild. I don’t like thinking about what could have happened to me if I had ignored my parents’ advice and eaten some random berry that looked vaguely similar to one my friend ate often. Nature literacy isn’t just a fun little activity for students – it is a must for young children growing up in British Columbia. However, how am I supposed to teach nature literacy if I know very little about plant identification myself?
While I will continue to upload content of my snorkelling journey, I will also be trying to gain more familiarity with the plants I interact with every day. My friend and I walked up Mount Doug on Sunday, and I was able to learn so much – I now know what a salal plant looks like, the appearance of a licorice tree, and that maple trees can be identified by their opposite branching patterns. In the next few weeks, I will be doing my best to expand my knowledge from this very rudimentary baseline.
Here is my second inquiry project post. If you can’t tell, I’m quite obsessed with the photos my roommate and I took while snorkelling! Before proceeding further into this course, I thought it would be useful to describe my general plan for this passion project. I also wanted to get started with some of the technology I will be getting used to (iNaturalist).
When I (hopefully) teach outdoor education in my future, I want to use iNaturalist as a tool for helping my students become literate about the plants and animals surrounding them daily. I’m quite bad at using the app right now, but that’s why we have a growth mindset and keep practicing!
I decided to use Canva for my first inquiry post. This was my first time interacting with Canva on my own, and I found it really user-friendly and fun!
I am really excited to get started with this personal inquiry project, and I look forward to updating you on my snorkelling journey through multiple modes of technology.
