Teaching with EL Biology

I’ve gotta say I was really impressed with the folks that came to our EL Biology presentation at Denver’s NSTA meeting, last week. After talking a bit about EL and then a bit about creating podcasts, I gave the attendees a little assignment–come up with a script for a podcast that you would provide your students that illustrated/explained the flow of genetic information. Being the nice guy that I am, I gave them all of 30 minutes to accomplish this task–that includes figuring out how to record with the equipment. To each group–kudos. I think these are really good first attempts at trying to work out developing and executing a script.

I promised to publish each podcast recording and keep them up on this site for about 2 weeks so that folks could download and work some more on these once they got home and got their ‘garageband’ or ‘audacity’ up and running. I’ve converted all to mp3’s. Here they are:

<<Removed 12-23-07>>

Contact me if you are one of the participants and still need the files.

I’ll leave them up here until after NABT’s meeting at the end of the month.

Load these into your sound editor and go to work….

BW

addition:

Ruth Hund from the Colorado Academy asked about embedding these files in a web page. You can use the “Embed” tag on your web page–something like this: “<embed src=”http://www.elbiology.com/ELblog/uploads/Denver1.mp3″ autostart=”false” volume=”50″ height=”60″ width=”144″></embed>” Sub in the url that points to where you uploaded your files and you should get something like the following:

<<Removed 12-23-07>>

Here’s an mp3 file, recorded in Audacity and exported as an mp3 but with no edits.

The flow of genetic information

Here’s a video recorded in CamStudio 2.5 using a graphics program to illustrate part of the mp3. The audio and video were then mixed and saved in avi format. Again, the audio was not edited to correct for mistakes.

Chart video

Here’s another video recorded in CamStudio 2.5 with narration recorded by CamStudio—this is a big file but will play in QT and Windows Media Player.

Video

Here’s the previous video uploaded to Google Video and embedded in this posting.

With our unusual weather this year, there is a lot of talk about global warming in the press and in your classroom.  Here is a short FAQ on global warming that you might find useful to share with your students.

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There is a lot of talk out there in education literature and the blogosphere about the advantages of using videogames to teach complex information.  Theorists and thinkers are delving into what makes these videogames so compelling to kids and how those elements might be brought to the education equation to best effect.

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Introduction (this is a repost of an article I wrote 10 years ago)

Science is driven by questions. For students to really experience the process of science they should work on answering questions that arise from their own natural curiosity. Ant lions (Neuroptera) and their intriguing behaviors naturally generate student questions. Since most students are not familiar with “doodle bugs”, ant lions make an effective way to open the school year. If a few students have prior experience with ant lions this only adds to the effectiveness of the activity.

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Many of you have asked for more information about that Harvard cell biology animation that I blogged about earlier.  Here’s another description of the action in that animation that I plucked from the internet.

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I just returned from the California Science Teachers Conference in San Francisco, California where I was lucky enough to meet some really creative biology teachers. Many of the teachers I spoke with were using the idea of blogs and blogging as a tool in their course. Read the rest of this entry »

  Biovisions Project, Harvard University

There are many ways to enhance your teaching with the effective use of technology  - assigning online activities as homework, using multimedia experiences flexibly in groups to differentiate instruction, as assessment experiences for students, using clickers to encourage class participation, assigning online projects and web searches, or using virtual labs to enhance a wet lab experience.  But most often teachers use animations or video to enhance their classroom discussions and lecture.  After all, it is the easiest way to leverage the technology - it only involves one computer and a data projector!  But even then, you want to have something worth showing, something that will capture your students’ imagination. 

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A follow up from an earlier post: Last weekend we had a storm system blow through. Monday, while running, I noticed girdled twigs had been blown off of trees during the wind storm. Twig girdlers only cut part way through a twig after laying their eggs. Today I stopped at one spot and took some pictures as promised earlier. Here is a shot of a typical scene under red elm tree here in eastern KS. You can see a number of leafy twigs laying on the mowed grass in the ditch.

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(a repost from an earlier entry on my other blog: Teaching Biology)

Last spring, I made a life-changing decision—I decided to become a fly fisherman. I have been fly fishing off and on for about five years but I had been fighting making a commitment to this new avocation. I was afraid of the time and resources that I’d have to commit in order to fulfill this passion. I’m not sure of the exact moment but I’m sure that it was in the spring along an Ozark trout stream. While I’m born and bred a prairie biologist, I do revel in the beauty of spring in the Ozarks.

There is real substance to the mystique of fly fishing—skills and knowledge that can take a lifetime to master but the rewards, while subtle, are great. For a biologist, I can think of few avocations with as much reward. As Norm Maclean explains in A River Runs Through It, “It’s not fly fishing if you are not trying to find answers to questions.” So, this essay is not really about fly fishing—it is about trying to find answers to questions……

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