Tina Harris
Bedford-North Lawrence High School
IN

Outdoor Ecology School

Sat, Jan 03, 2015 11:05 AM
Cross grade and community interactions!

This teacher set up an outdoor field day for high schoolers to work with elementary students with a twist - stations that taught ecology and relationships while still being fun. While some stations taught more "traditional" science like macro-invertebrate identification or looking for populations in quadrants, others played games that showed predator prey relationships or other concepts and helped to use of energy that elementary students come to school with. In addition, the community was invited to join as well. So many positive connections in a single day!

Idea Bank: Electronic BeeSpace

Sat, Jan 03, 2015 10:49 AM
Extremely Flexible Resource!

The Electronic BeeSpace website described in this article seems to be adaptable to a variety of teaching purposes and this article is designed to help teachers maximize their use of the site. In addition to long video clips of various topics related to research and biotechnology that might be useful for STEM integration, each of these have been broken down into smaller segments that can be used in addition or on their own to emphasize various points. Because of this flexibility, the site is not isolated for use in only high school but parts could be integrated into middle school curriculum and easily into undergraduate biology coursework. A very useful resource!

Something’s Fishy in Paxton Lake

Fri, Jan 02, 2015 2:40 PM
Case Study in speciation

This case study demonstrates to students that speciation is an on-going process today as it has been in the past. This particular example is mentioned in the NOVA program What Darwin Never Knew, so this would be a good activity to do with students prior to showing all or a portion of this video about how our knowledge of evolution has expanded and evolved over time. I would do this with either high school or undergraduate biology or environmental science classes.