The focus of this class is to both learn about and discuss how various forms of technology are used in biology. For part of the class we had to create an ecospot to share an aspect of technology and how it connected to conservation and science. 

Some of the main concepts I learned in this course connect to ways people are using technology in ways I might have considered unethical or impossible, for example climate engineering and cloning (O'Brien, 2015). And also, things I find amazing and so exciting, like using environmental DNA to track organisms, for example tracking jaguars using the environmental DNA they leave after drinking water (Wilcox, et al, 2021).  This technology of eDNA has also been used to track invasive fish (Klymus et al, 2015) and even identifying species through DNA in the air (Clare et al, 2021). It is like a magical searching device.

Another focus of this course was on effectively communicating a scientific issue to the public and helping them understand it. We discussed how we might make connections to social media (Veríssimo, 2019) and how framing can help to more effectively communicate challenging scientific concepts (Kusmanoff et al, 2020; Schmidt, 2009).  Finally, we read more about how we can incorporate traditional ecological knowledge into monitoring as well (Thompson, et al, 2020).

My ecospot contains links for how a teacher might incorporate the tech tools iNaturalist and Seek into their classroom by demonstrating how they might use them either on a virtual field trip or to prime their students before they go on an actual field trip. It also includes links to teacher resources and short videos from others as well as ideas from current teachers on how they have incorporated these apps into their classrooms.