Using Technology in Biology: Reflections

I wanted to post the final presentations for the class.  We recorded them at ustream.tv.

(FYI: If you’re particularly interested in my section, you can fast-forward to 1:09.  My section runs until about 1:27. )

Thanks to Alice, Cathy and the other members of the class!  I was thinking the other night, “What kind of teacher would I be if I had gone to teach somewhere else?”  I have to think I would be completely different.  I consider it to be a great boon that I get to teach in a collaborative environment and in a 1:1 school.   But, neither would be as successful without the other!  When I think about how much I have been learning since the beginning of the year and how that is manifested in the student experiences in my class, it boggles my mind to think that some teachers do the exact same thing year after year.

Tags: collaboration, ustream.tv

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Tags: disease, immunesystem, slideshare

Immune system – Animations

We used 5 forms of “critical input experiences” for this content.

• Guided notes with a PowerPoint
• A set of flowcharts (innate and adaptive)
• Animations (linked from the powerpoint)/Youtube video
• Role play – the students generated this in groups and acted it out in class with props they brought from home

Student feedback

I used a GoogleForm as a formative assessment and a way for students to self-report the usefulness of the tools. Here are the results.

What stands out here for me is that students reported animations as useful, but not the most useful way of learning the immune system. There is a wealth of new questions that comes from this data, but when I have 28 hours in my day, I’ll be able to dive into some of those.

Summary

I have found this course to help me develop my use of technological tools. I’ve approached aspects of my goal, but by no means met it. It’s something I’ll be working on, perhaps indefinitely!

To work on my goal for improving the use of technology in Biology, we have embarked in a variety of projects over the past 4 months. I’m going to focus on three of the project and some of the evidence from students.

Cells Parts and Functions Webquest

Overview

• Innerlife of cells video
• Cells parts and function webquest:
  • collected sites for them to visit
  • used a form to draw and list function of cell part

Student’s feedback

Engagement: this was a little surprising to me. From anecdotes, students said they were tired of webquests, having seen them in so many other classes.

Here are some quotes student reported in survey monkey to the question, ” What other ideas or thoughts do you have to share about this activity?”

“I learn better from direct teaching, but it was a good starting point. I am really glad we went over it in class and get a completed web quest to refer to.”

• “It allow you to learn the cell parts and functions quick and efficiently”
• “It wasn’t that fun, but it gives you good study notes”
• “i think that sence(sic) you are seeing the actual part you are learning not just mentally but also vishually (sic)”
• “The online activities helped me but I found myself struggling to pay attention. It didn’t really stimulate my brain at all.”
• “It was fun, cool to see the differnat(sic) cells and what they did.”

So, those mixed responses were helpful. I think we’ll reconsider how we use this activity next time. Perhaps we can find another “hook” for students to find this information worthwhile to learn.

Cellular transport – Molecular Workbench

For this project, we used a variety of animations, along with a diffusion lab as the “critical input experiences” for the content. As a way to check for student’s understanding we used Molecular Workbench. This works best if students download the software, rather than using the online version (for our use of Macs, anyway).

We can see student reports like this:

We found some pros and cons of this program

Pros

• Independent – students were able to do this for homework
• We did not have to invent this assessment
• Student reports are created – allows me to check for understanding

Cons

• Glitches with reporting – we could not access all of the student’s reports (we’re still working on this problem)
• Student reported frustration – with repetition in the activity and inability to send report to me

Continued in next post

These are some examples of the summary papers students wrote on the Astronomy topics.

Life on Mars

Halley’s comet

Big bang

Life of the sun

Planet formation

Fate of the universe

Life on Mars

Wormholes

Europa

Star cycle

As I watched Clarence Fisher in his talk about Classroom 2.0, I did have an “aha” moment when he talked about classrooms as a studio. This has sort of been the case in my Physical Science classroom for the past couple weeks as we worked on our Astronomy unit. This is not a major unit in the course, but we do want kids to get as much as possible from it. Students presented their research to us, and wow, was there a lot of variety and creativity in the presentations! This video shows some of that.

Download Video: Posted by CWoot at TeacherTube.com.

But the connection to the assignment for me was to really push myself in Biology to get us to this type of environment. Right now we have students to a disease project–it’s detailed and really a traditional research paper. While, those are important (Clarence talks of shifting our entire view of classrooms–some places I think some resembling of a traditional classroom is okay), I do think that we can move toward what he describes. How can we prepare them to have the skills they will need in their world? Not our old world.

How can I connect this to my everyday work? I think I’m doing this a lot already. I really don’t see the classroom as a place for students to come learn from me. I don’t think the way we have our Biology class set up, that we construct ways for students to be the experts and “prosumers” of information very often, but I’d love to improve that. To me a prosumer would be someone who can interact with the content for a purpose. Sometimes, we are just providing the content. But, everyday I do think about changing attitudes toward education and reshaping my thinking of what my classroom should look like. I am improving this slowly.

Tags: Classroom 2.0, prosumer

Some video I uploaded to Teacher Tube of my students making craters.

Tags: astronomy, Teacher Tube, video