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Tips for taking pictures of your research team

We love seeing and getting pictures of your research team in action! University of Minnesota Extension Communications put together three simple tips for taking great photographs - try these tips for powerful photographs of your monitoring, investigation and teamwork.

1. Try striving for a candid photograph, where team members are engaged in interaction or tasks at hand. They might be seemingly unaware of the camera or perhaps glancing at it, but most importantly they're captured "in the moment," authentic -- not posed.
2. Try to get a perspective that is "first person." The goal is for the audience to feel like they're sharing in that moment. Photos of team members/subjects are shot at eye level or from below eye level.
3. Use natural lighting whenever possible - which is easy to do when you are in the field monitoring birds, water, and monarch larvae!

Reflective activities

Building in reflection throughout your research team is an important way to build the learning experience with youth researchers. This University of Wisconsin Extension guide contains 18 different reflective activities designed for service learning projects. These can all be applied in Citizen Science by adapting the language in the reflection questions for monitoring and investigating. Let us know how these work for you!

• Research Team Meeting Planning & Reporting Form

  Some of you asked for a digital version of this form so you can type notes directly into it before your research team meetings. After each research team meeting, you also complete the same form online to both record what was planned and what happened at each meeting. Please complete the online form within two days after the meeting so that the information can be used for the evaluation of the project.

• Consent: Refresher video
  Need a refresher on how to explain the consent form to parents and youth? Watch this brief video before your orientation meeting!