For the last twenty years, the educators and students who participated in our Amazon Workshops have snapped amazing photos of rainforest biodiversity. Unfortunately, most of these photos have only been seen by a handful of friends and family - or worse they are in a shoebox under the bed!   
 

One has to wonder...what could we learn about rainforest biodiversity if we had access to all the photos taken over the last two decades? What if we could take all those photos and sort them by location and date and species? Would we be able to see patterns of distribution? Discern subtle changes in populations? Stumble upon something new and undiscovered?  

Last summer, we launched a pilot of Project Noah during our Educator Workshop and we began to construct a virtual field guide to the region we visit each summer. We created a "mission" on Project Noah and called it Species Spotlight: Peruvian Amazon.

For 2013, we are incorporating Project Noah more fully into our Educator Academy in the Amazon and are already working with educators across the country to connect our Amazon images to their classrooms. This year, in addition to simply capturing images of what we see, we will also use our Project Noah spottings to explore the themes of plant and animal adaptations, biomimicry, and climate change in the Amazon.

Pictures may be worth a thousand words,

but the AWE they inspire is priceless.  

JOIN THE CONVERSATION! How can you use these photos to incite curiosity? What questions do they raise? What research might they prompt? Visit our blog and post your responses

  At its core, Project Noah is about facilitating awe by connecting people with the nature that surrounds them and giving them a tool share it with others. We were initially attracted to Project Noah because it gave us the ability to shine a spotlight on the Amazon and further our goal of fostering awareness and appreciation of this disappearing global resource.

But we think Project Noah also has great potential in the classroom as well. Imagine the excitement of your students photographing and documenting every species of flora and fauna in your school yard with their cell phones and simple digital cameras. Imagine taking it to a higher level and involving local biologists, parents, and environmental organizations to create a community wide BioBlitz and classroom citizen science project. Project Noah offers you a free digital platform for cataloguing, describing and organizing photos to do just this!

We're staging this kind of BioBlitz in the Amazon again this summer during our 2013 Educator Academy in the Amazon.  Working closely with Project Noah's education director, Dave Munson, we're using images and technology to forge a connection between the Amazon and our local environments. 

 
 Creating digital images like these is just a first step.   In order to fully realize the potential of Project Noah as a powerful instructional tool, we need you, your students, and your imaginations! 

We asked Dave how educators are using Project Noah's education portal in their classroom instruction and how it fits with the race to the top, common core, and the next generation science standards.

"Project Noah was created to provide people of all ages with a simple, easy-to-use way to share their experiences with wildlife. By encouraging your students to share their observations and contribute to Project Noah missions, you not only help students to reconnect with nature, you provide them with real opportunities to make a difference. The really exciting thing about our new Project Noah Education Portal is that the educators out there in the trenches are finding new ways to use Project Noah tools in their classrooms every day, and the ways in which those tools are being employed are as diverse as our community. I've been working with other educators and curriculum leaders on best practices and the new science standards, and there are a lot of great connections there with Project Noah investigations. Our Writing Goes Wild lesson plan is just one example of how your students' Project Noah spottings can be used to directly address many of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. The flexibility of the platform makes Project Noah a really useful tool for a lot of innovative teaching - place-based education, mass customized learning - it's experiential learning at its best."

Project Noah is working with educators across the country to develop lessons plans that address common core and next generation science standards. Here are just a few examples.