Using Audiovisuals to Promote Conservation Education
As an educator, have you ever been frustrated trying to find quality images and films of wildlife to use in the classroom? Have your students had difficulty searching the internet for scientifically-authenticated biological information of plants and animals to use in homework assignments or projects? Do you wish there was one central website that had both thousands of films and images and biological fact files for the Earth’s most threatened species to use in formal education? Well, look no further!
ARKive, an initiative of the nonprofit Wildscreen, is a unique global initiative gathering together the very best films and photographs of the world’s threatened species into one centralized digital library creating a stunning audio-visual record of life on Earth. Free to all at www.arkive.org, ARKive is an especially valuable educational resource as teachers have unprecedented access to every film and photograph to supplement education in the classroom.
With over 45,000 images and 6,000 films cataloguing over 6,500 species, ARKive invites website visitors to come face-to-face with not only species threatened with extinction across the globe but also those right in your backyard in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. For example, check out the Piping plover species page and the image of a mother plover incubating her eggs. The accompanying biological fact file details the plover’s range and habitat and threats to the population and by clicking on the Listen to this species link on the bottom left, our friends at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have provided an audio recording of a plover song so your students can not only see and learn about this species but even hear it!
Here’s a link to other Chesapeake Bay watershed species on ARKive:
- Bald Eagle
- Peregrine Falcon
- Virginia round-leaf birch
- Puritan tiger beetle
- Shortnose sturgeon
- Indiana bat
- Diamondback terrapin
- Bog turtle
- Green turtle
- Hawksbill turtle
- Leatherback turtle
- Loggerhead turtle