Lizzie Seymour, The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, United Kingdom
Beccy Angus, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland Edinburgh Zoo, United Kingdom
Rachel Arnold, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland Edinburgh Zoo, United Kingdom
Europe / Middle East
The UK went into lockdown due to COVID-19 in March, keeping families inside, closing Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park for 99 days and creating a new culture of home-schooling. RZSS Discovery and Learning felt that during this strange time our mission to ‘connect people with nature’ and ‘turn empathy into action’ was more important (and more difficult!) than ever before.
In order to help sustain a connection with nature during lockdown, we opened access for free to our existing online learning packages for families to use together on our website ZOOdle (https://learning.rzss.org.uk) and began weekly themed releases for new resources, culminating in a library of over 60 online and offline activities across 17 topics. Using experience gained from this work, we also moved our famous summer school entirely online offering 5 days of inspiring virtual activities and live-streamed sessions with carefully built-in evaluation to measure the impact on the participants and their whole families.
This session will look at some of the design and pedagogical processes that went into building ZOOdle and Virtual Summer School into platforms that inspire awe, create empathy and guide those feelings and knowledge into action to help nature and contribute to its conservation. We will share examples of how we successfully connected 24,000 families worldwide back to nature throughout the 3 months of UK lockdown, our lessons learned from these initiatives and our plans to sustain and expand this for the future.
Speaker Biography
Lizzie, Learning Technology Officer for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, received the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year award in 2019 for her unique work using technology to build in zoo visitors a greater understanding and empathy with animals, conservation causes and the environment.
Beccy is the Discovery and Learning Manager for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS). She loves everything engagement, from formal education for nursery to tertiary to providing amazing learning experiences across both our sites for the daily visitor.