Educational Technology for Engaging in Science
Canopy in the Clouds and Plant-O-Matic
The homepage for Canopy in the Clouds, leading to navigable 360° panoramas (on the ground and in the canopy) that all have embedded photos, videos and text about the natural history of the cloud forest.
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Who: Highly interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, artists, educators, and computer programmers including Drew Fulton (Drew Fulton Photography), Colin Witherill (Broadreach Images), Eric Fitz (Ocotea Technologies), Erin Dukeshire (Orchard Gardens School), Javier Espeleta (University of Washington), Brody Sandel and Jens-Christian Svenning (Aarhus), Brian Enquist (University of Arizona) and Naia Morueta-Holme (UC Berkeley)
What: Canopy in the Clouds is a web-based learning environment that uses immersive natural history media to teach K-12 earth and life sciences. Plant-O-Matic is an iOS mobile application that provides an on-demand guide to all of the plant species in the user's location, anywhere in the Americas. When: Canopy in the Clouds launched in 2011 in English and Spanish. Since then, we have received tens of thousands of visitors annually from nearly every country on the planet. Plant-O-Matic launched in late 2014 and has been downloaded nearly 10,000 times. Where: The media for Canopy in the Clouds is from the beautiful tropical montane cloud forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica, with a particular focus on the cloud forest canopy. Plant-O-Matic contains information on 88,000 plant species from all over the Americas! Why: We believe we have a responsibility to make science available to broader audiences - it's as simple as that. |