What you put into a treehouse can range from write-ups of experiments to poems and songs in honor of your favorite organism. Treehouse builders can also contribute images, audio and video of the organisms that they are studying. From butterflies and frogs, to dinosaurs and fungi, treehouses are for celebrating and exploring the diversity of Life on Earth.
- a growing community of bioscience learners who are working to make the ToL an open access digital library about biodiversity and the evolutionary history of organisms. See: Learning with the Tree of Life
- treehouse games, stories, investigations, art and cultural pieces, biographies, and teacher resources on the Tree of Life. See: Treehouses, Building Activities
- with other with kids, teachers, science enthusiasts and scientists from around the world and connect your work to the larger bioscience community. Coming soon: ToL Discussion Forums
- Build treehouses with your classroom.
- To register classroom projects so that your students can build treehouses, you must first register as a treehouse builder, then you can login and choose to register a classroom project. See:
- Create excitement
- about bioscience learning by providing your students with fun and creative ways to learn about Life on Earth.
- the scientific inquiry process in your classroom and help create young scientists. ToL learning resources assist students with building their prior knowledge, reflecting on their practice, publishing their results, entering into the dialogue of scientists, and generally building their self-concept as science practitioners.
- Forge connections
- between science, literacy and technology learning. Creating web pages provides a motivating medium to promote student writing and scientific enterprise. The process of building a web page will cultivate students' basic computer skills, as well as more advanced areas such as the creation of multimedia files.
- learning about biodiversity by sharing your expertise and enthusiasm with kids, teachers and lifelong science learners.
- a broad audience with your materials and information.
How will the Tree of Life use my work?
Contributors keep the copyright for any treehouses, images and other media submitted to the Tree of Life database, and a copyright notice is printed alongside all materials displayed on the ToL web site. Upon submitting a file, contributors grant the ToL Project non-exclusive rights of use. For detailed information about the available options, please see Tree of Life Use of Contributions.
What information will I need to supply when I build a treehouse or submit media?
When you upload a treehouse or media file to the ToL database, you need to provide the following required information:
- The name of the copyright owner
- The use permitted by the copyright owner (see above)
Additional Information you will need to supply for Treehouses
In addition to the name of the copyright owner and the use permitted by the copyright owner, when you compose a treehouse you are also required to provide:
- The names of the authors (all authors must be registered contributors). Registered contributors will have the choice of whether to list themselves as authors, copyright holders, and correspondents. Treehouse builders can also choose whether to publish their email address on the ToL. Builders who are under 13 years of age will not be able to publish their email address.
- The names of any parties who helped contribute to the building of the treehouse who should be acknowledged.
- The ToL learner level (beginner, intermediate or advanced).
- What group of organisms on the Tree of Life we should attach your work to.
There are several other fields to fill out that will make up the content of your treehouse page. To see example data entry forms with all of the information you will need to fill out please see the Treehouse Builders Guide.
Additional Information you will need to supply for Media
Please see Contributing Images and Other Media to the Tree of Life
Below are some system requirements and suggestions for users who would like to contribute ToL treehouses.
- Your computer needs to have cookies and java script turned on in order for you to login and contribute treehouses and media.
- Your web browser needs to support the Treehouse Editor and the ToL Easy Editor.
The ToL Easy Editor is used to add text and media to your treehouse page. See the box below for the browsers that support the Easy Editor.
- On a Mac, the ToL Easy Editor does not work in the following web browsers:
- (the Easy Editor toolbar will appear but not work properly)
- Internet Explorer on the Mac
- (the Easy Editor toolbar will not appear)
- We recommend that those on a Mac use the freely downloadable browser Firefox.
- The ToL Easy Editor works in the following web browsers:
- We recommend the freely downloadable browser Firefox for composing treehouse pages. We do the majority of our testing with Firefox.
- Internet Explorer (IE) version 6.0.29 and above on Windows only.
- Internet Explorer does not work on a Mac. (To view your version of IE, choose: Help - About Internet Explorer)
- Netscape, Mozilla and any Mozilla based browser
- Any browser based on Gecko
The ToL Easy Editor (toolbar pictured above). Make sure your browser is compatible with the ToL Easy Editor used for adding text and media.
with any questions you may have