Puffins And Pandas

 


In 2020 a wildlife competition, The Puffin Prize, was sponsored by The Wildlife Trust of South andWest Wales (WTSWW) & International Classrooms On Line (ICOL).


The organizers of the competition were trying to understand why young people enjoy nature.

What do they find interesting and exciting and what would encourage them to explore further, to spend more time with nature?


All that the entrants had to do was to share one of their favourite experiences of nature.


It could be a visit to a nature reserve, or a walk through an urban woodland, a hedgerow or a field full of flowers.  The nature experience could be submitted as an art poster, an essay, a poem, a picture or a combination of any of these.  The hope was that the submissions would signify why the applicants enjoyed nature, what they find interesting or exciting and what makes them want to get close to wildlife.  Perhaps they would come up with ideas that would make it easier for them  to explore the countryside and its wildlife.


Puffins And Pandas’ is a new project that developed from reflections on the responses to the Puffin Prize’.  In particular, feedback pointed towards the need to boost the use of IT networking for people to engage seamlessly with environmental issues by creating digital stories about  nature conservation.  Inspired by the blogs ‘Kate On Conservation, and Nerworking Nature With Postcards, ‘Puffins And Pandas is a group of bloggers, each using Google Blogger to create a personal informational website for sharing discrete diary-posts about ideas and issues of managing Earth for wildlife conservation.  


To take this viewpoint brings nature writing into focus. Because of developments in IT, illustrated digital stories are now both easy to produce and simple to publish and are an ideal way to energize learning and engage people of all ages in blogging at a deeper level. Digital storytelling creates space for individuals to pursue personalized topics about which they are passionate.  It grows their learning around assigned topics, and showcases their learning for peers, teachers, and audiences beyond school, all of whom are able to network with the storytellers.


Puffins and Pandas are the world’s most well known animals and they are universally recognised as being charismatic symbols of nature conservation.  They are beautiful, endangered, and loved.  Like the Giant Panda, Puffins carry messages of hope that humanity will eventually put nature first in all that we do before it is too late.  


Oliver Prince, Puffineer in the UK Puffin Project says: “Puffins are lovely and remarkable birds. They have so much character with their handsome appearance, their behaviour around burrows, the lovely noises they make and the astonishing effort they go to feed their young pufflings!”  


Puffins are wild animals that are easy to anthropomorphise so they can bridge the communications gap between humans and the wild and free.  In particular,  they can spark interest in addressing climate change, reducing and cleaning up plastic waste, and other human-caused challenges that threaten their existence.  In this sense we can have conversations about nature conservation on behalf of puffins..


‘Puffins and Pandas’ is a conceptual vehicle to allow the power of storytelling to blossom in learning spaces.  The nature hub, is the small Welsh island of Skomer.  The technical hub is Google Classroom, and/or Google Blogger


To help these conversations along two flipbooks are available as copyright free resources, ‘The Atlantic Puffin’, provides a detailed study of the natural history of puffins.on Skomer  The book is illustrated with over 70 colour photographs of puffins showing fascinating pioneering shots of them  both underwater and underground.  The other flip book, ‘Skomer Island', is the readable report of the first field survey of the island carried out in 1946.  


‘Puffins And Pandas’ is not a competition. The aim is to encourage Micro-learning, which involves learning in small steps. School activities based on micro-learning usually feature short-term lessons, projects, or coursework that is designed to provide the student with ‘bits’ of information. For example, rather than trying to create a broad subject all at once, aspects of the subject are broken down into smaller pieces of data and reassembled as personalised topics, thus recycling eye-sized information into knowledge and networking it via the Internet.  


The copyright free digital resources to help people along are:-


The Puffin Hyperook- a flip book

Island of Sustainability-- a Google Site

Skomer Island- report of the first field survey-a flip book.

S.K.O.M.E.R. - a mindmap of cultural ecology

Natural History of Selborne- a Gutenberg Press online ebook

Educating for change- a free forum

One Small Wilderness- a personal mind map of a special place


To participate all you have to join the coll;ective do is create a free account with Google Blogger, create your very own Blogger and send its Internet address to


bitesizebloggercollective@gmail.com


It will be added to a list of blogs that will be made public with the understanding that the collective will be self sustainable.


Go to a  Word Press version of this post.


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