Share your ideas & projects

Join a lively discussion

Vital Signs discussion forums are the place for sharing your expertise, bouncing ideas, gaining perspective, offering insight, asking questions, finding answers, and motivating one another. It's the place for connecting with those in the Vital Signs community who share your passion, need your advice, or are eager to help. Spirited discussions among novices and experts alike will benefit our entire community.

Do you have an idea for a new forum topic? Can't wait to hear it. Contact us with a title and a brief description and we'll start the thread for you.

Create and share a project

You've done the hard part, observing, collecting and analyzing data. Now do the fun part and share what you've learned in a creative way. Make your voice heard with a podcast or video. Summarize your findings with a newspaper article or blog entry. Try your hand at writing a formal scientific paper. Tell us a story using your species photos. Write a poem that inspires data quality. It's endless really.

Post or embed your project in our Project Bank for the community to learn from and enjoy. Comment on projects that help you learn, make you think, give you a good idea, or inspire you to go do something you wouldn't have otherwise.

Share a great curriculum resource

Vital Signs is as much a learning community as it is a research community. As we all engage and guide our learners through investigations, we'll inevitably create and twist and dream up better ways. So goes the art of teaching. Capturing and sharing these best practices with the Vital Signs teacher community through the Open Resource Exchange is what will keep things fresh, exciting, and relevant for you and your students.

Try out someone's lesson plan and tell us how you made it your own. Post that new activity you've been dreaming up and get some feedback. Share how you modify an activity to connect it to your students and your place. By sharing your own resources, best practices, and student projects you will inevitably improve your own practice and have a wild impact on how students across the state learn science, math, social studies, language arts, music, art...! Go for it.

Guidelines for discussing, creating, and sharing

When you post projects and curriculum resources you are agreeing to license them with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license so that others can use, remix, and share your work. Learn what that really means, and make sure that your project or resource is eligible before you post it:

CC-BY license guidelines
CC-BY Guidelines for Projects
CC-BY Guidelines for Education Resources

All discussion forum posts and community comments are immediately made public. It is our collective responsibility to uphold the site User Agreement, and to make sure our forum contributions are always:

• Constructive and encouraging
• On topic and appropriate
• Inquisitive and thought provoking
• Supportive of learning

If you have questions about the CC-BY license or our User Agreement, please ask us.