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.

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

Consider the privacy of minors

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

You may want to ask students to:

• create usernames that do not identify students as belonging to a class or give out their home address
• not subscribe to mailing lists if you are under 13* (confirm this), instead, pass questions through teachers

Public Lab resources for teachers:

Public Lab has a number of resources for teachers. Some are more well documented than others.
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. Different resources will be appropriate for different age groups and not all tools that could be used to teach are identified as such. * There are posted activities where the color of light from flames are analyzed here and here. * There are numerous examples in the Public Lab site of mapping using a balloon or kite with a camera dangling below. * You could put together a lesson about identifying oil samples using materials from here.

What resources are we missing?

What could we be developing to help you with your class? Is there some physical / biological phenomenon that you would like help explaining? What lessons would be most helpful? This is a wiki page, which means that you can edit it. If there is some technique that you believe would like to see developed by the Public Lab community, you should write it in here. While it might not get developed, it can not hurt.