Using the Seek app to identify wildlife

Download the Seek by iNaturalist app on to any mobile devices you wish to use. No login required. Practise using the app before using with learners. 

Download Seek

Location

Outdoors

Useful guidance

• Enquiry-based learning
• Nature-based discovery
• A Nature Park guide for EYFS

How you might use Seek with learners

There are many different ways you can use the Seek app with learners. You could:

• Run a session around a particular group – plants, insects or fungi. Split your learners into groups and encourage them to use the app to look for things in these groups on your site.  
• Use Seek to complement other Nature Park activities such as:
  • Colour collecting - can learners use Seek to identify what they have found before they add their colours to their collection?
  • Counting outdoors – extend this activity by asking learners to identify the living things or natural patterns they have counted
  • Insect olympics - use recent Seek observations to choose an insect to focus on each week
  • Leaf identification - once learners have found the tree their leaf has come from, can they use Seek to identify it?
  • Plants and their jobs - can learners find any of these plants outdoors?
  • Texture mapping – during or after building their texture map, invite learners to identify where these textures/surfaces have come from

However, you use Seek with your learners, take some time with them looking at any pictures they have taken and discussing what they found. 

You could discuss:

• I wonder what colours and patterns we might find?
• I wonder if we can find another plant/creature like this one?
• I wonder what the app will tell us about this living thing?
• I wonder how we could take a good photograph of this living thing?
• I wonder why this leaf is this shape?
• I wonder why this bug chose to hide here? 

Seek versus iNaturalist  

Seek			iNaturalist
Does not require an account			Requires an account
Data you record does not leave your device			Data you record is publicly available biodiversity data that contributes to global scientific data
Seek allows curious naturalists of all ages to privately earn badges and participate in challenges to observe organisms with an instant reward			iNaturalist is an online community that allows you to publicly share and discuss observations from nature in order to identify organisms and create research-quality data for science and conservation.
No personally-identifiable information is collected from users who do not log in with their iNaturalist account			Photo, location, and time are recorded with each of your observations in the iNaturalist database

Observations are not directly uploaded from Seek to iNaturalist. However, it is possible to do this even if you do not have the iNaturalist app – all you need to do is create an iNaturalist account. This enables you to upload the observations made by learners, without them needing to interact with the iNaturalist platform. Please see the video below for guidance: