Category Archives: #edtech #scitech
First Unit Reflections: Is It Working?
This is posted over from my personal reflections blog, but it is about my current IB Biology class. I love these students – they are can-do, and give really useful feedback.
Today we took the opportunity in the IBBio class to reflect on the unit we have just completed, including the tasks and assessment. As always with CA students, the results were constructive, positive and useful, with a general affirmation of the value of what we are doing as a class. The feedback included our personal GoogleSites project, with most students keen on continuing and feeling it helped them learn and with some interesting alternatives for those that it is not.
This kind of feedback is really useful once the class has settled in. They are open enough to be able to be honest, but it is early enough to change practices where needed. We will make some adjustments, though we are generally on the right track with this group. I’m really looking forward to seeing the process and products of the students who have elected to become science writers…
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IB Biology Orientation
Welcome to the 2013-14 School Year!
Here is a quick overview of i-Biology.net for new and returning users – teachers and students – and I wish you all the best in your studies. Please note that this is not an official IB product and so should be treated with due caution. I do my best to keep it current and accurate, and appreciate constructive feedback.
I am active on Twitter, sharing ideas and resources using the #IBBio hashtag.
The purpose of this site
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This was designed as a support site for my own students, and hosts all of our class resources: presentations, links, videos and more. It is intended to allow for more student-focused teaching in that we do not go through every presentation as a lecture, this resource acts more as a student text and set of provocations for discussion and inquiry. Having said that, we are preparing for a terminal examination, so there is significant content to prepare students.
I have students keep track of their progress in their own personal GoogleSites and we have focused sessions on some topics and subtopics where needed. We use Quia extensively for pre-assessment and practice, and all tasks are based around model exam questions, data analysis, discussion and lab work. There is a high degree of cooperative learning in the class. Students have their own copy of Allott’s Study Guide and we have some Course Companions in the class.
Content
By using the tabs at the top of the site you will find pages for all Core subtopics and all of the options and HL topics that I have taught. I do not have (nor plan to have) content for the remaining options.
Support resources:
- Command terms & sortable syllabus
- Exam skills – drawing, calculations, etc
- IA & 4PSOW support, including a student-facing unpacked coversheet for self-assessment
- Resources to support ICT in IB Biology
- Lots of lesson ideas for TOK Connections in IB Biology
Blog
The front page of this site is a blog, which is periodically updated with resources, news or discussion of science and education. Follow it, if you wish. I appreciate comments and sharing through Twitter.
Creative Commons
This work has been shared in a spirit of Creative Commons. I am happy for it to be shared and used in classes, but it is not acceptable to re-host it on other public servers or adapt it to sell. Find out more here.
Biology4Good Charity Donations
Pay It Forward
This work is open and shared so that others can benefit and save time, focusing on good teaching and learning instead of having to reinvent the wheel. I do not charge for access, though I really appreciate it when people make small donations to one of my chosen charities through my JustGiving page Biology4Good. Pay it Forward – please estimate the time and money you have saved by using this and give a small proportion to charity. Find out more here. Donors giving GBP20 or more (and leaving their email address) will be given access to a DropBox folder with more editable powerpoint files.
Comments
I moderate all comments. This is a site for students, so please behave accordingly. I do appreciate questions and suggestions for corrections.
Enjoy!
Processing Data: A Department Student Learning Goal
In the 2012-13 school year, our science department worked on a collaborative Student Learning Goal to improve student performance in Criterion E: Data Processing. Click here to find out more about the process, outcomes and next steps.
Think Global, Act Local: Give One World a Chance.
The One World criterion in MYP Sciences can get a bad rap and I think it is because it has been misinterpreted as being unscientific or too ‘soft’ for a science class. Sure, you don’t want to spend the whole semester doing One World essays, but we can make much better use of its potential. It can be a good showcase of student writing and ethical discussion, as well as an authentic connection between research and real world.
Here are a few pieces of recent work from students that give some idea of how engaging it can be. All are from the same class, with the prompt “Think Global, Act Local“.
- Aili’s investigation into the one-to-one programme and paper use.
- Sanam also uncovered some shocking facts on paper use and printing.
- Maggie’s post, “Make your meals healthier, even after you’ve finished.“
- Joanna’s post on e-waste and if we really need that new phone.
- Kyoko on balancing paper towels with hand dryers.
- Parina’s idea for a vegetarian challenge to reduce our meat consumption.
……….o0O0o……….
I think for One World to be successful it needs to have the following elements:
- An audience. I hate that students write for me alone, so the more that we can blog, the better: especially when it is community-related. The blogs allow us to include images, videos, links and mirror more closely the work of real science writers. I do need to get better at getting students and others to comment on their work.
- An authentic purpose. In the examples above, part of the purpose was to highlight that our own actions as a school have consequences, but also to give some inspiration for CAS projects. Connecting One World to other subjects or global issues might help students see the purpose of their research and writing.
- Differentiation. Of course it’s boring when 20 students write the same response to the same question. A good unit question might be all the stimulus it takes to get many different ideas, all connected to the significant concepts. We should help students pick questions of personal interest.
- Enough guidance to help those in need, but not enough to stifle the students’ voice. The criterion is complex, and it is easy to break it into a checklist or paragraph-by-paragraph pro-forma. For students that need this level of support, that is fine, but for some it is like a straitjacket. I like to give students the guidance, but encourage them to take their own path, if they can.
- Time. It is very easy to set these kinds of tasks as homework and be done with it, but that doesn’t do the students or the task justice. If it is a summative assessment task, it should be mostly completed in school; if it is valuable to count in the report, it is valuable to… value with time.
- Feedback and self-assessment. Drafting in GoogleDocs makes for easy, timely and directed feedback to students during the process.
What other suggestions do you have for successful One World work?Do you have examples of great student One World work you’d like to share? If so, please do so in the comments.
Here’s a little presentation that might be useful for a formative or introductory task:
Exploring Environments: Student-Designed Units & Hapara
Click here for a summary of our recent student-designed Grade 10 (MYP5) Environmental Sciences unit that we planned for students to design and implement. I used this project as my trial for Hapara, a GoogleDocs dashboard system.
Hapara Dashboard: screenshot well after the project has finished, but you get the idea. Green = Bio, Orange = Chem. Click on the image for the post about the project, including some sample documents.
In summary, using this as a management tool allowed for a smooth and highly differentiated, student-led inquiry unit in MYP 5 Environmental Science. Find out more.
What are we really learning from practical work?
As we study science, a lot of our time and resources are devoted to implementing an engaging practical scheme of work. Are we really making the most educational use of this time, these resources and the opportunities that we have?
Teachers all over the world use experiments and demonstrations to engage students in the concept being taught. But does this actually improve student learning? Two recent videos have got me thinking about this issue, and before you read on you should watch them both.
The first is from UK science teacher & communicator Alom Shaha (@alomshaha), half the brains behind the sciencedemo.org website. The video was produced for the Nuffield Foundation’s new Practical Work for Learning resource. He refers to a number of research papers in the video, and is also one of the leaders of the #SciTeachJC (science teachers journal club) twitter discussion group.
Do you recognise those labs and how do you use them? Do the labs we do really help us teach the concepts we intend them to, and how can we rethink (or at least evaluate) our use of labs.
The second video is from US Chemistry teacher Tom Stelling (@ChemistTom), on his “vRant” about students asking to “blow something up” and the dangers of ‘wow’ demos as distraction rather than education.
https://twitter.com/ChemistTom/status/332685283105587200
Note: this post rambles a bit from here on. If you want to know more, please read on. Otherwise, all the good bits were in Alom & Tom’s videos.
Personal GoogleSites: A Learning Project in #IBBio
Personal GoogleSite: Click to view an example.
Although i-Biology hosts all my content resources, the main class resource students are working with is a personal GoogleSite to track their progress and reflection. Click here to find out more about how it works.
Student Science Writers: Environmental Issues
As we finish our Exploring Environments student-designed units, students have published blog posts for the science communication assessed task. In this task, assessed for Communication in Science, they had to pick a case study or current news item of interest and direct connection to their group’s unit. Using guidance, models of good science writing, GoogleDocs drafting (and for some, pointers from professional science writer Andy Revkin), they wrote short articles on their case study.
There’s no point writing for an audience of one, so…
..here they are!
If you do visit and feel like posting a comment, remember that these are school students, and that your comments must be appropriate, constructive and positive.
- Maggie’s post on fighting Aricanized bees with… more bees!
- Heather’s post on invasive mussels and their damaging impacts.
- Parina’s post on 13 oils spills in 30 days (!)
- Joanna’s post on Australia burning.
- Kyoko’s post on painting the roof white to cool the town.
- Rohan’s post on the cost of shark finning.
- Sanam’s post on the end of the reign of the king of butterflies.
- Stephanie’s post on cell phones and honeybees.
- Mahya’s post on Australia’s new colour on the temperature chart.
- TaeHyun’s post on spring floods and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.
- Yota’s post on Sea Shepherd vs Japan.
- Aili’s post on bluefin tuna being worth too much dead to be allowed to live.
- Cedric’s post on the mystery of the dead pigs in China.
- Mikka’s post on the shrinking Antarctic ozone hole.
- Haruki’s post on the highest global temperatures in 4,000 years.
Hanging Out with Andy Revkin
“How do we head through nine billion people by around 2050 without really screwing up too much?”
Andy Revkin writes the DotEarth blog for the New York Times, and has been writing about the environment for almost thirty years. His topics are diverse (and his Twitter stream rich with links) and connected to much of what our students have chosen to explore in our current Environmental Sciences unit in Grade 10 (MYP5).*
He very kindly agreed to G+ Hangout with some students before school, to discuss science writing in general and how he masters his craft on the environment beat. We learned a lot from Andy, and loved his assertion that he is not a ‘doom and gloom’ writer, but that the environment is different, and more complex than we first thought.
……….o0O0o……….
Here are links to some of the ideas & issues he mentioned in the chat:
- His ‘Postcards’ series, snapshots of science and environmental research
- Psychology & the environment
- Schools and syllabuses designed with the environment in mind
- Twitter in the classroom
- Obama and the National Academy of Sciences
- Will we have fewer, more dangerous hurricanes?
- The Burning Season book: the murder of Chico Mendez
……….o0O0o……….
Andy chatting with the early arrivals on G+ Hangouts.
*As part of our current Grade 10 Environmental Science unit, students have broken into groups depending on their interests and IBDP Sciences choices. They have designed their own unit content, though assessment types are common – a lab they design, a test we’ll write based on their chosen assessment statements and a piece of science writing. I’ll dedicate a whole post to how the unit worked once we’re done.
For the science writing task, students are asked to find real-life articles, case-studies or stimulus materials that will provide a context for some of their content. We showed them some models, of great science writing, but I realised my Twitter lists were light on environment writers.
A quick tweet (and some follow-up emails) fixed all that:
https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/322324597791916032
Thanks again to Andy for chatting to us – it was a great opportunity to talk to a real pro.
It is also evidence, once again, that Twitter can be an amazing tool for classes and professional development.
Electronics Bathed in Blood & Destruction
Although George Monbiot’s fruitless search for an ethical smartphone has ended with the discovery of tin for parts being sourced through child labour on the Bangka Islands in Indonesia, it has turned up a lot of useful resources that could form great prompts for an MYP Sciences, Design and Economics inter-disciplinary unit on life cycles of electronics.
Some ideas that could be pitched at different levels for students:
- What is life cycle analysis and what do we mean by ‘designed for the dump’?
- How can we create resources that help us appreciate what we have, rather than feeling the ‘need’ to pick up the latest and greatest?
- Design a campaign or project based on one of the 8 R’s (below).
- Analyse and evaluate the data in the Short Circuit report. Write a case study or investigative piece one one og highlight facts, issues, problems or potential solutions.
- Collect and analyse community data on perceptions of need, rate of purchase and disposal of electronics. Do people know what is in them, where their dangers are and where they end up?
One of the resources shared by Monbiot was this fantastically detailed document called the Short Circuit Report, produced by the Gaia Foundation & Friends of the Earth’s Make It Better campaign. It is packed with information, data and images. One in particular stood out as a discussion starter on choices and design:
How would the 8 ‘R’s change your approach to consumption and design? Please read the full Short Circuit report for this diagram in context. Click the image to view.
The Story of Electronics is another video introduction that might hook students into finding out more about these shiny gadgets that are permanently attached to our bodies.
For more resources and ideas, have a look at this Storify:
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