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Biology Homework for The Whole Year? Yes, please.
This summer, I decided I wanted to work on a project that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. While I was teaching (I’m home right now with my kids for a few years), I had a tough time finding meaningful homework assignments to give in biology. So many textbook questions had just cookie-cutter […]
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Use a Molecule Viewer in High School Biology: STAR Biochem
Have you ever wanted to show your students what proteins or other molecules actually look like but struggled to use the 3D molecule or protein viewers? Some of the programs available are really slow to load on not-state-of-the-art computers (who in education has state of the art computers??) and some of them are so difficult […]
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Teaching Biochemistry in High School
One of the most difficult units in high school biology to learn (and to teach!) is the biochemistry chapter. The complex vocabulary and the abstract concepts make this unit seem like a foreign language to most students. I know because for the first few years of teaching, all of my students had the same […]
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The Salvation of Doug and the Demise of Bill: What Genetics and Biochemistry Are All About
Now if this blog wasn’t nerdy enough after posts about Drosophila researchers and ken-and-barbie mutations, I am going to now highlight one of the best, but very nerdy resources on the web for teaching students what genetics and biochemistry are all about. Geneticists and biochemists have traditionally been studying the same thing, but they approach […]
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Teaching About Viruses: Web Resources and a Reading Lesson
With all of the Ebola and Enterovirus news lately, I created a list of web resources for teachers looking for accurate information and teaching resources on viruses. All of these links work as of 11/15/2014! Viral Life Cycle: A HHMI Viral Life Cycle Animation: http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/viral-lifecycleHerpes Life Cycle Animation: http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/herpessimplex.html Retrovirus Life Cycle Animation: http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0072556781/student_view0/chapter18/animation_quiz_3.html Flu […]
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Modeling Nucleic Acids with Pipe Cleaners, Beads, and Paper Clips
A while ago, I brainstormed and came up with some bead and pipe cleaner activities to help my students model proteins, carbohydrates, and lipid molecules. For a year or two, I’ve been trying to figure out how to best show students what monomers are, what polymers are, and why they are important. After all, they […]
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Hands-on Biochemistry: Beads, Pipe Cleaners, and the clearest way to teach monomers and polymers!
A few years ago, I looked at my biochemistry unit and tried to think of some way to revolutionize it. Monomers, polymers, carbohydrates, phosopholipids, amino acids… To my students, these aren’t concrete things. I might as well be speaking Chinese. I decided they needed a hands-on activity to understand that these are things, actual molecules, […]