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

Ten questions were used to inform us how we are engaging students with a “personalized learning environment”. I took the suggestion from the blog and made a graph of my responses to the questions.
I don’t feel that I can give myself a 5 in any category, but I felt most confident about these 5 areas: #5. virtual environment; #6. “school time” and “personal time”; #7. Access to resources; #9. Access to peer review, and #3 Students know what they need to learn
.
The #5 virtual environment and #7 access to resources are criteria met because of the one-to-one laptops we have in our school and my use of tools in class. I have tried to have students use a variety of tools. I model them, and I think students feel they have access to others. I’ve been impressed that my students rarely need direct instruction for tools I show them, and often choose appropriate tools on their own. The #6 school time and personal time is not a distinct boundary because students can access all of the tools we use from anywhere. I find that students learn both in class and at home with few problems. I think some students do their best work in class, but I also have been impressed with what they are capable of doing on their own. For example, I had a group of students compose, and record songs about Protists entirely outside of class.

Finally, the two categories that I feel I have more direct responsibility for are access to peer review and students know what they need to learn. #9 Peer review has been emphasized in my classroom throughout the year in all of my classes. I have had various structures for this to take place. Sometimes peer review is live, such as when students are working as a group on a lab or activity. Other times, I have more structured peer review for products students have worked on individually. In my last survey of students, they reported that the peer review process they did on a lab report helped them with their thinking and writing. I’ve also had student use wikis and implemented structured peer review at multiple times during the construction of the wiki.

#3 Students know what they need to learn in my classroom for the most part. I gave myself a 3 on this because I still am working on this aspect of my teaching. However, for all projects a complete product descriptor is available to students. I find that product descriptors are useful to students, and exemplars are also very helpful. This is sometimes hard as a new teacher because predicting what students should be able to learn and do in a project can be like predicting how high someone can jump just by looking at them. You might get an idea, but students can really surprise me!

Tags: engagement, peerreview, productdescriptors

The second assignment asked us to look at the tools our classmates were using and try one in our teaching. I did not find any of the tools others had talked about particularly compelling for my classes. So, I investigated a few other tools and tried two.

1.) Gliffy. I was not overly impressed by this site. I thought it might be nice to have students do graphical representations online, but I found that the Inspiration program my students have and already use is probably more useful and user-friendly.

2.) Note share. I’ve heard other teachers are using this, and I wanted to see if the nature of the program will work for my needs. In Biology and also Physical Science, much of our notes are diagrams. Often, I think students benefit from drawing the diagrams and I think it is also useful to see diagrams within the notes. So, does note share allow for diagrams? yes! But, you have to drag the images from the Finder. (their help) So, it involves an additional step from making the notes in Word. However, you can also import notes from Word. I’m debating trying this with my Freshman for our Motion unit. That will be in April.

3.) Google Notebook. I decided to look at this as an option for students to take notes for my class, as well. Unlike Note share, this cannot include images or diagrams. So for me, that limits its usefulness. I am using it as a place to take notes in my own meetings, and research. It’s nice because it has a quick link on the browser, so you can access it instantly.

4.) Delicious But, the real assignment was to use another tool in my teaching. So, I went back to a tool I’ve raved about before delicious. I love this tool for my own research purposes, and to give students links I’ve found. For example, here’s my page that students went to for practice and more independent learning about diffusion and cellular transport. I sent them to that site and had them choose animations and tutorials from that list to do as practice during class. But, they also have access to that anytime for preparation for the upcoming test.

I also just started using it in a new way this week. I had students get their own accounts and we are all now linked in a network. They are starting a research project on diseases. I have some resources on my own account that they can access for a start, but I can also see the resources they are tagging in their research. We just started this, but when I have an example to show, I’ll list the link here.

Tags: delicious, gliffy, google notebook, noteshare, research

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