CLASSROOM CONNECTIONS: EMPLOYING AND SHARING NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTION BASED LESSONS

Natural History Collections offer a wealth of resources for educators and learners. To this end, digitization makes specimens, and the data and images associated with them, more accessible to a wide audience. However, educators and learners must know that resources exist, where to get those materials and how to use them. We, as collections professionals, must promote our outreach materials, make them readily available, and provide the background knowledge for accurate and safe use of specimens, data and supporting resources. The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Education Committee formed in 2020 to help develop, support, and promote formal (K-12, Undergraduate and Graduate) and informal education, and outreach relative to natural history collections and biodiversity science as informed by natural history collections. One of the first premiere initiatives, Qubeshub, established as a site to aggregate natural history educational resources, publishes Open Educational Resources (OER) through the Natural History Education Portal (https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/collections). Anyone can add an OER resource to this portal. Sharing a resource as an OER on QUBESHub means your resource will be assigned a DOI and you will have access to usage metrics.

The SPNHC Education Committee hosts a virtual Natural History Education (NHE) DemoCamp (https://spnhc.org/education-democamp/) Building upon the previous work of the in-person “Share Fair,” the NHE DemoCamp strives to share, discover, and discuss educational materials that support a framework in natural history. Educational materials shared varied widely in scope, audience, format, and topic, from how to use R to analyze biodiversity data in the classroom to how to make a compelling outreach video for a general audience. Our presentation highlights how to discover these collections based educational resources, the successes and failures of our events, and paths for connecting with the Education Committee.