I read many other peoples blogs and figured out how to add a photo!

Thanks to everyone for blogging. I have been brousing through them all day and feel like I have learned a lot. In the next few days I hope to respond to posts and let you know individually when I read something valuable.

Thing 17: A New Thing

From the Metronet information literacy website I looked at the life science lessons that are offered and found a link to the pbs site, which I do love, and it was a lesson about the brain, which I love even more. It has a good 3D representation of the brain and a timeline of brain research.

I think that history of science is one of the hardest things for me to teach, because I have never really been into history/memorizing stuff, but with this timeline I think that kids could get into learning about it because of the animations involved.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/history/index.html

Thing 12: Other search engines

http://www.googleguy.de/google-yahoo/

I went to this site and it was interesting to see google and yahoo results side by side on the page. I searched "Human Genetic Variation" which is the topic in class this week and found that the two search engines were pretty much identical in the top 10 results generated, except they were in a little different order, Yahoo put wickipedia at the top of the list while google put it at the bottom of the first page for example. Also, only Yahoo displayed my favorite site "Sciencedaily.com" on the first page.

Interesting. I think I will have students look at this and search for a specific question that they have and see if any trends develop.

Customized Search Engines

I created a customized search engine, but I only have one website on there right now. I can see how this would be good if I wanted students to practice searching techniques, I would know exactly what results choices they got with each search and would be able to guide them to just the sites that I like for each topic.

I think that it would take some time to search through sites to add to this if I wanted students to truly research on their own, but I never knew this feature existed and I will explore more about the google educator site for sure - I think it had more features that I would find useful.

Search engine details [Edit this search engine]
Genetics

Genetics searches 1 site: www.sciencedaily.com

Keywords: "human genetic variation"

Thing 7: RPC thoughts

As I am going through the RPC, starting with the first step, "question" I already have a way to improve my disease report assignment for next year. Right now the report is simply about a disease - basically students pick a disease/disorder, and gather information that is relevant to what we have been learning about our bodies, and are required to talk about current scientific research public health applications.

Next year I will change the assignment so that an actual research QUESTION is the basis for the report. For example, not just "Lung cancer" but "How is the prevelance of lung cancer changing in our society". Something that requires application of gathered information, and not just regurgitation. I think they will learn more.

Thing 8: Dribbling Lessons

Plagarism in written reports has been a huge issue for me as students have gotten into the habit of copy/pasting from the internet and into their reports. I have obviously done a sub standard job of teaching them the right and wrong way to gather information from the internet, because last year by typing sentences from reports into google search I caught about 40% of my students plagarising by not using quotation marks around material they took word for word from websites.

This year I used the dribbling lesson http://www.lib.sfu.ca/researchhelp/tutorials/interactive/plagiarism/tutorial/Plagiarism-Pretest-QUIZ.htm

Which is a 7 question quiz that gives students senarios to judge as plagarism or not (they are all plagarism :)). I did it as a whole class activity and I think it really hit home, especially the part about images needing to be cited. Many searched for the sources for their images immediatly after. Also, I was able to warn them that if they did plagarize, they would get a 0 on their report without a chance of a rewrite, and also I would report the incident to the assistant principal.

Thing 11: Google Scholar

I introduced google scholar to students in my Pre-AP biology classes and required them to cite at least one paper in their disease report. They seemed interested in the variety of scientific articles that could be found on line, and how different they were to read than the other types of articles on websites that they have found.