Ahoi crew, welcome to the January 2023 monthly update from the ARK, the online space for nature and sustainability educators. Despite the Christmas break, we kept ourselves busy, and we’ve got lots of news and updates to share with you!
School Class: Bulk Import of Students
One of our goals for 2023 is to increase adoption of the ARK and the Mobile Campus in schools. You can expect a steady flow of improvements and new features in the areas of managing school classes and outdoor learning spaces, outdoor learning experiences, visualizing and reporting on what you’ve learned so far, and more.
This month, we made significant improvements to the process of onboarding a School Class. You can now bulk add students to a School Class by importing from a CSV file. This makes it easier than ever to get your students set up and ready to go – you’re one Excel sheet export away.
School Class: Expanded dashboard
The School Class Dashboard now shows much more information about the class’ progress. This includes averages of Impact Points, Specimens observations, and more.
Posts: With pictures, in Activities
Last month we introduced Posts in the Commons space, as a way to share information and communicate about nature in your surroundings. There have been several improvements this month: Posts can now have pictures! You can add a single picture, or a gallery, to make your posts stand out and communicate visually. Posts have also expanded to into Activities, making them a perfect tool for structured bidirectional communication between facilitators and participants. Visibility of a post can now also be restricted (participants only, team only, …).
Can’t wait to see what you share!
User Profile Link
Each user profile now has a unique link that can be shared with others. This can be great when you need to show your learning or facilitation progress. The ARK can be your all-in-one passport for all your nature and sustainability related activities.
New Tree Ecosystem Services Formulas
We’ve received new Ecosystem Services formulas from TU Munich, and integrated them into the ARK. This means you can now make new calculations for specimens of:
- Acer platanoides
- Acer pseudoplatanus
- Aesculus hippocastanum
- Betula pendula
- Fraxinus excelsior
- Platanus x acerifolia
- Quercus robur
- Robinia pseudoacacia
- Tilia cordata
So far, the new calculations are used to calculate the age and height of a tree, based on its girth, which is still the only measurement you have to take when mapping trees on the ARK. Updates for carbon storage and cooling power calculations are coming soon – stay tuned.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this update on the latest developments of the ARK. If you are interested in details, head to the complete changelog.
As for the next month, we will be working on a brand new mapping tool, to simplify the process of mapping new trees, more social features, and a complete rewrite of the My Impact page, where all your activity on the ARK is displayed.
See you soon, and as always, stay in touch!
- Telegram: https://t.me/+adbZH4DWoBMwNWY1
- Matrix (bridged with Telegram): https://matrix.to/#/!dnpmHlnAbDXXUisAdi:greensteps.cn?via=greensteps.cn&via=t2bot.io&via=matrix.org