The first webpage that came to mind when starting this project was about a lesson I did on The Peppered Moths of Manchester. This is for a 7th grade Life Science or 9th grade Biology classroom. Students will need to use a computer lab to do this assignment. Students go to the website, learn about the life cycle of the Peppered Moth, the story of how pollution effected the population of Peppered Moths, scientists' research on the matter, and finally play a game where they get to be the bird and actually simulate natural selection. This activity is through a flash player.
URL: http://www.techapps.net/interactives/pepperMoths.swf
Another really cool webpage shows the relative size and scale of a cell and other very very small structures. The animation allows the viewer to slide a horizontal bar across the screen to zoom in and out. The animation starts with the size of a coffee bean and zooms all the way in to a carbon atom. This site really gives students the feel of how small some of the things they are studying really is!
URL: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/
Lara-
ReplyDeleteI love the Peppered Moths webpage! This is a really great example of how content can be delivered to students through engaging and interactive technology. So many of my students had a hard time visualizing anything they read- these types of webpages are the key to reaching those students who have those visualization problems. Awesome...
Great visualizations! Students will be engaged with these lessons and want to learn more about the peppered moths and cell structures, too. As a math teacher, I can appreciate the difficulty of teaching the concept of scale. Giving students "real" examples makes learning the concepts much easier. Very cool sites.
ReplyDeleteLara, excellent selection of webpages! I especially like the visual of the cell size and scale. The students will be very intrigued to be able to move the slider to view the different parts of the scale. Since from the initial viewing it appears that there are only a few parts there, students will be very engaged in learning about the cell structure. The interactivity of both sites is awesome.
ReplyDeleteI love a good flash page! The peppered moth site looks like a great interactive flash page that your students will enjoy using, and will most likely lead to a greater understanding of natural selection. How difficult is it for you to schedule a computer lab? Does your school offer computer laptops?
ReplyDeleteI REALLY like the genetics website. I can spend hours looking at these type of things, and bet your students will enjoy it, too. There is a website I visit from time to time by Florida State (I google Powers of Ten, FSU) where you start looking at the Milky Way at 10 to the 23 meters away, and move through a series of screens until you are 10 to the negative 18 looking at quarks.
These sites are great! Nice Work!
Seems like science teachers are really embracing technology. The lessons found very interesting! Anytime you can engage a student with video, simulations, and just hands-on computer use, they will be far more interested than a worksheet and a book.
ReplyDeleteI read Nick's comment and wondered about your computer situation at school as well. I work for a virtual school, so I'm always interested in finding out what the availability is like at a face-to-face school.
You have found such great websites! I love the peppered moth one as well. What a cool idea for teaching about natural selection. That's something that makes it real to the kids...much more interesting and interactive than reading about it in a textbook or listening to a lecture. Since it's almost like a game, it would really appeal to your students.
ReplyDeleteI also really like the cell website you found. I have seen a similar one that shows the universe. It really is mind-blowing, and seeing something like this makes something that is normally really abstract a bit easier to grasp.
(Sorry I forgot to post on this sooner! It was an oversight on my part.)
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