Successful Online Training!
August 25th, 2011Five residents from around Maine attended our August 17th online training and helped make the evening webinar a success. Participants learned about phenology—what it is and why it’s important to climate science—and about the national phenology network that Signs of the Seasons is part of. They also learned how to select and prepare a site for data collection, how to record phenology information on data sheets, and how to enter data into the USA-National Phenology Network’s database, called Nature’s Notebook.
As with most trainings, the attendees had varied reasons for being there. One teacher from the Baxter State Park area would like to build phenology data collection into his already rigorous inquiry-based science curriculum.
Esperanza Stancioff training volunteers
Another teacher plans to take the information back to her Midcoast school district to interest other teachers in using the project with their students, as a compliment to other citizen science work they already participate in. Other participants were interested in SOS as an extension of their own work, e.g., as a master gardener or informal citizen science educator.
The webinar represented Signs of the Seasons’ first experiment with desktop sharing software, and online interaction with the public. The software was “WebEx,” which allowed us to record the entire event. We hope to be able to post clips of the training on our website and we’ll let you know if those become available.
Meanwhile, we continue to receive inquiries from around Maine. Where in-person trainings aren’t possible, live online trainings and asynchronous archived material will be offered for people who are scattered far and wide around the state.
If you missed this online training please stay tuned to our website for further announcements, or send your contact info to medea.steinman@maine.edu so you can be added to our mailing list. Thanks to those who attended this training and to all of you who are contributing data to Nature’s Notebook. Let’s keep in touch!
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