What other two topics during the year frighten the students (and sometimes the teacher) more than photosynthesis and cell respiration? These two units really can be daunting. They don’t lend themselves to a lot of fun activities and often the teacher feels stuck listing chemical reactions on a powerpoint, using vocabulary that might as well […]
We all know that there are excellent videos we as teachers can show in class to help further student understanding. And there are a lot of awful, non-useful videos out there that are only good for killing time, which is never a good teaching strategy. In this blog post, I will give you my […]
As a science teacher, we have unique challenges and unique opportunities at the same time when it comes to technology. Each teacher has different resources available. Some schools have 1:1 chromebook/lapbook/iPads and each student has access to terrific web resources. Yep, I’m jealous too. And there’s the school I worked at as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s that time of year! Time to stock up on plastic easter eggs. It’s actually pretty difficult to get these little guys at other times of the year, but before Easter, you can find them everywhere! You can buy a whole bunch of eggs, , some pipe cleaners, and some googly eyes with about […]
Flies really are the coolest model organism to study. Despite the fact they like to stowaway in your hair, there are a lot of reasons why Drosophila are exciting to study. 1. They are so colorful! The eye colors are truly beautiful to observe. When scientists are creating new mutants, sometimes the […]
After my semester of avoiding a transformation into a were-rat, I applied to a Drosophila melanogaster genetics lab. I liked it so much I stayed for two summers and two full school years, until I graduated. Here are some secrets about Drosophila research that everybody who works in a fly lab knows. 1. You […]
One of my favorite things to teach is genetics. There is something so unique about the field in all of biology. In fact, it is the field that convinced me to become a biologist in college and go to grad school. In the coming weeks, I will write a blog series about how genetics is […]
In my last Differentiation in the Science Classroom post, I wrote about lab reports. And now I’m going to write a post about NOT writing lab reports. (Crazy, I know, but bear with me…) Having students write a full lab report every time I did a lab would have pretty much burned me and my […]
Helping all students with writing in the science classroom can be really difficult. A lot of science teachers give up trying to teach writing, because they feel the pressure to get all of the science content crammed into the year. Lab reports take an eternity to grade. And bad lab reports take longer than an […]