Using Technology in Biology: Reflections

I find that as a second year teacher, collaboration is much more fruitful for me this year. I do find that it takes significant time. I feel fortunate to be on the Freshman Team, with time allocated specifically for collaboration. While this has higher points and lower points, I have found this year that I have been contributing more to the collaboration both in my discipline and across the team. It’s very satisfying to contribute ideas, try them out in both of our classrooms and feel some success.

For Biology, my colleague and I have to carve out that time on our own. We have made a consistent effort to do that this year, and I can see benefits in my classroom as well as to the course. We collaborate on assignments, assessments, tools and other curricular matters primarily. Again, the small successes make that time feel worthwhile.

I know that there are a lot of avenues out there for collaboration beyond my building. However, I find that time is against me on that front. I do bounce things off of my college friend who also teaches biology in another state. But, I have not found a simple way to collaborate online. I think this is because I find fruitful collaboration includes some kind of personal connection. While I am a Digital native in many respects, I find myself clinging to the Digital immigrant cultures of face to face connections based on personal connections to be most effective to me. Perhaps I just need to carve out that time in the way I have for building collaboration. What’s to give?

One idea for additional collaboration: Using more blogs such as those linked to by Oakes in the article. From Toby Fischer’s blog, I found many links about using wikis in classrooms.

My second idea is to ask my friend to share his bookmarks with me. I love Del.icio.us for this (as you can tell by my previous post).

Tags: collaboration, delicious

Trial of Delicious

I’ve been using Delicious for about 6 months now (my Delicious bookmarks). I’ve decided it’s extremely useful. Not only do I use my tags from multiple machines, I’ve been tagging many websites I come across (sometimes even if I’m not sure I’ll use them again). This has proved useful in my classes. Frequently during Biology, I find I remember an image of an organism, or a short video clip I saw of it that would illustrate a point well. With Delicious, I’m able to find that link quickly. I’m also able to tag Science news articles that I might use for various units. This way when I come across a news article that isn’t pertinent to our current unit, I easily access that later.

I’ve also been using Delicious to share resources with students. Instead of linking resources for a topic from my webpage, I send them to a page of a tag or tags from my Delicious account. I’ve tried this for a webquest activity for a cells unit. I found it was helpful, but I need to use the “Notes” section of the tag better. This way I can help students choose the appropriate tool for their needs.

Finally, I’m considering using Delicious as a student tool in conjunction with Netvibes for a disease report. Students traditionally have researched diseases using the CDC and other resources they find. I would like them to share the websites they use with Delicious. This could be done by each student creating an account and being networked with me. I’d like them to do annotations on their Delicious sites, instead of an annotated bibliography. This would enable me to be more participatory in their research process. They would be rating sites for usefulness as well. The Netvibes component would be a tool for their research. I’d like them to use it in conjunction with GoogleNews. They could do an advanced search on GoogleNews for their disease and a location, RSS feed to is using Netvibes. They could also use Netvibes as an aggregator for these RSS feeds, finding images, etc.

Any thoughts on any of these tools?

Trial of Bubblr:

I thought this might be a good tool for one of our projects in Biology that has students explore Protists in story, song, and other media. However, I looked into this more, and there is a lot of highly inappropriate content there. Too bad, I thought it had potential.

Tags: delicious, diseases, research