The Public Lab site is a social research sharing website for non-professional and professional scientists alike.

It's like an online lab notebook where students can:

• post their work
• get feedback from peers and other Public Lab members
• create a profile and recieve attribution for your contributions
• participate in open source collaboration

Get started

To start using PublicLab.org, ask each of your students to sign up and create a profile. (read on for privacy considerations and protective tactics)

Watch a brief video about how to post a research note, and read about research note posting here.

Consider the privacy of minors

This section is an extension of https://publiclab.org/wiki/anonymity#PublicLab.org written with minors in mind.

Some schools have internet access policies that can be compatible with publiclab.org with (some of ) the following steps:

• Do not use your real name as your username
• Do not use your first and last name together anywhere on the site
• Do not use any of your existing social media handles as your username
• Do not link back to your personal social media
• Do not share your gender; reduce/eliminate the use of gendered pronouns in your writing
• Do not share individually identifying photos of yourself on your profile page (photos of hands are OK, photos of faces are not)
• Do not share photos of your group in a research note in which individual faces are identifiable (consider adding friendly emojis or blur!)
• To protect the location privacy of minors while mapping and capturing/sharing geographic data, while posting research notes about your mapping activity or stitching images into maps in mapknitter.org, do not share photos in which individuals are identifiable, such as those taken close to the ground while launching or catching the camera.
• Do not share your location or address on your profile page
• Do not publicly post your contact info (email, phone, etc)
• Do not share personal health information

Additional options

Teachers / Guardians / Parents may consider these additional options for how minors interact with PublicLab.org, as well as join the ongoing conversation about privacy and minors at https://publiclab.org/q/19897 :

• Teachers / Guardians / Parents could become moderators on the site in order to more closely monitor for the unintentional disclosure of personally identifying information by their students / children while sharing their work on PublicLab.org. Please email moderators(a)publiclab.org to explore this option.
• Not allowing students / minors to create accounts at all
• Only allowing students / minors older than 14 years of age to create accounts
• Creating teacher / guardian / parent-managed accounts on behalf of one, some, or all students
• Creating group accounts for students/minors to share. Example: “Team Dolphin”

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Public Lab Resources for Teachers:

Public Lab has a number of resources for teachers.

There are a series of well documented physical science lessons published on this site as wiki pages.
- The first lesson is called "Wetlands, water and oil", and it can be found here.
- The second lesson, called "More than meets the eye" discusses visible and infrared light. It is found here.
- The third lesson is called "Photography in a new light". It is found here.
- The fourth lesson is called "Environmental Monitoring" and it can be found here.

Activities

Here are some additional activities particularly suited for use in the classroom:

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Posting assignments on PublicLab.org

You're welcome to post your own assignments to PublicLab.org with a "Post a Response" button, and have student's responses collected in your post:

https://publiclab.org/requesting-responses

Here are some examples:

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Looking for more information?

Check out the questions and answers below. If you don't see what you're looking for, ask a question of your own so our community can lend a hand.