From Dragonflywoman's blog

Click on this image or this link to Dragonflywoman’s blog to learn how to preserve insects in hand sanitizer….what a cool way to prepare insect specimens for the classroom.

http://dragonflywoman.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/hand-sanitizer-preservation/

BTW,  you’ll find a lot of great insect resources on her web site.  I think you’ll be impressed.

Kim Foglia

We lost a great biology educator, Kim Foglia on Jan. 4th, 2011 after a long, dignified and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer.  Back in 2009 a number of AP Biology teachers got together and worked hard to establish an award from NABT, sponsored by Pearson, Benjamin Cummings, recognizing Kim’s unprecedented contributions to the AP Biology teaching community.  She was not able to attend the ceremony at the national meeting but she sent a letter that Patti Nolan Bertino read in her stead.  At the time I thought the letter was particularly reflective of the Kim I knew.  She was appreciative and honored but she immediately put it a challenge back on all of us.  Patti, recently shared the original letter with me and I reproduce it here to honor Kim and to pass her challenge onto the NABT and AP Biology communities:

I want to thank the National Association of Biology Teachers for honoring me with the AP Biology Service award.  I am truly overwhelmed by the attention, but the recognition is much appreciated.  I was so sad that I couldn’t attend this meeting in person, so I want to thank Patti for acting as my stand in.  I also want to thank all the teachers that have been sending me prayers and well-wishes this year.  You have no idea how much you have bolstered my spirit and strength.  I am pleased to say that I am winning my personal war on cancer and look forward to attending next year’s meeting.

This award is for service to the AP Biology teaching community.  In that vein, I want to issue a challenge to the teachers in this room.  You would not believe how many teachers write to me each year pleading for help, telling me they are taking over the AP Biology program at their school and the retiring or departing teacher has left them with nothing.  Rather than this proprietary stance, we need to see ourselves as art of a community–a cooperative communty.

We lose nothing by sharing.  In fact, we all gain.  I know I have gained as much from other teachers as I have given out through my Web Site.  So here’s my teacher challenge:  Look at your classroom and pick out your best practices and offer to freeely share them with teachers beyond your district.  You’ll be amazed at how much more you will get back.

And to NABT, I issue this challenge.  Become the active catalyst to creating this collaborative community.  Acknowledging individual efforts through this award is the first step.  It is a wonderful idea.

However, may I suggest, you can go further.  We need an online community through which we can archive and share quality resources developed by teachers.  There are some very successful models for this that we can learn from.  And it could become the premier venue for best practices in biology teacher.  I look forward to working with you to bring such a project to a successful launch.

We have nothing to lose and so much more to gain.

Thank you.

Kim Foglia

November 12, 2009

We’ve got our work cut out for us.  There is a new AP Biology curriculum coming down the line.  Kim was helping us write some of the new labs for this revision.  The new approach is going to require more than ever that we, as a community, get together, like Kim has challenged and build our own set of resources that reflect the kind of excellent teaching and mentorship that was the hallmark of Kim Foglia.

She was very talented, with a deep knowledge and passion for biology but even more than that she had spunk.  I admired her talent and spunk greatly.

We need more teachers like Kim–it’s time to answer her challenge.

BW

Cook Off!

All right, I confess.  I love cooking shows.  I can’t resist them.  As I enjoy cooking myself, I find it inspiring to watch well trained and creative food gurus work their magic.  How exactly do they hold the knife?  In their estimation, how much is a “handful”?  What pots, pans, and kitchen gadgets do they use?  When the directions say, “simmer until reduced”, what does it look like exactly?

When I was at the gym yesterday, I saw that Rachael Ray (the host of a regularly scheduled television cooking show, for those of you who don’t know) was featuring the World’s Biggest Cooking Demo on her show, I couldn’t help but get sucked in.  Sure it was a corny tactic, but I have to say, it was pretty darned clever.  The producer’s plan was for Rachael to prepare a chicken dish outdoors, live, in front of her entire New York City studio audience, with each audience member positioned at a mobile cooking station, following along with her. Hundreds of little cooking stations were set up, equipped with a hotplate, pans, implements, and all the ingredients required for the dish.  It was quite the scene – all of those audience-member-chefs, lined up, following along with Rachael.

But that’s not all – hundreds more cooks kept up with the proceedings in live Los Angeles studio audience and even more followed along with the demo in their homes, watching it on television, and Skyping in their questions.  Occasionally, Rachael would take a break from the demo (while the sauce was simmering) to take a Skype call from a viewer in Cleveland or Tampa.  The caller was projected on the big screen, beamed in from his or her kitchen, working away at the same recipe, asking for a clarification or offering a suggestion.

I thought the whole thing was brilliant.  Who doesn’t like to feel a part of something larger than themselves?  So, why not leverage that and turn it into an event?  While watching the proceedings, another thing came clear to me –  there was infinite variation and adaptation at work.  As the camera scanned the 100′s of cooks putting the chicken dish together, you could see the color and consistency variation in the sauce; some toasted their corn muffins, some didn’t; and the Skype callers had all sorts of ideas for varying the recipe, improvising on the procedure, and making it their own.  Subliminally, we all got the message that there was no one right way to do – the recipe was a guideline and experimentation off the basic plan was endless.

By now I’ll bet you can tell where I’m going with this….how about a National Lab-Off?  Imagine thousands of high school students all over the U.S. doing a photosynthesis lab together on one promoted day of the academic year.  One master teacher leading the event, providing a game plan from which everyone could improvise, experiment, and collaborate.  Live video feed piped into classrooms all over the country. A producer to manage the video feeds and Skype calls with questions.  A post-event blogging session to pool data, interpret results, and discuss conclusions?  What a way to generate enthusiasm for investigation while at the same time encouraging the use of participatory media tools!  Man, if Rachael Ray can do it with honey mustard chicken, surely it could be done with a biology lab?

Together we walked through 10 different projects that 9th/10th grade or AP biology students had created using web tools like VoiceThread, Animoto, ToonDoo, Bookemon, Facebook, Google Earth, and creating podcasts. Then, because the group was small (but mighty!), we decided to try our hand at creating a podcast together. We broke into three small groups – one wrote the script, one picked some photos from a collection I’d put together on a jump drive, and one brainstormed ideas on how such a podcast might be best used.

Here’s the online slideshare from the session but maybe the best way to give you a feel for it is to share with you the podcast that the group created. In the space of about 10 minutes, here’s what a creative group of biology teachers and one PowerMac did together.  Fabulous.

nabt podcast

This is the audio version, the enhanced version (with photos) can be downloaded onto an ipod or droid.

For those of you attending the NABT conference in Minneapolis this year, you might have noticed this card (above) in your bag of goodies from the registration booth.  The card urged anyone posting content related to the conference to add the identifying “hashtag” #NABT10 to their postings. A hastag is a short character string, preceded by the # sign, that serves as a marker.  A tag. An indentifier, so that others can find your stuff in the fast sea of information known as the world wide web.

For those of you who were not able to attend the conference, this hashtag makes it easier for you to tap into the stream of content coming from the conference – photos, blog posts, tweets (from Twitter), Powerpoint slide decks – any of those items posted online that include the hashtag “#NABT10″ can be easily found.

Screenshot of Tweetchat, displaying the stream of tweets with the tag "NABT10"

Here’s an example.  If you go the web site Tweetchat (a Twitter application that makes it easy to search Twitter with a particular hashtag), you can pull up all of the Tweets posted with that hashtag.  Here’s a glimpse of those (the real list is much longer and must be scrolled through:

In there, you’ll find tweets that I posted during Sue Black and Nancy Monson’s excellent “Biology Best Bets” talk – their fourteenth such talk at NABT. Sue and Nancy give their audience the benefit of their combined 40+ years of teaching experience and share the most incredibly creative ideas for demonstrations, labs and activities.  So, even if you weren’t with us in the room, you could get a “feel” for their talk from my tweets.  Not only that, I shared the link to their handout (the url of which they gave us during the session).  It’s the next best thing to being there.

Here’s another example.  On Saturday morning, Richard Dawkins gave a featured speaker address – a Q/A session, attended by every biology teacher there.  The room was packed.  Scrolling through the list of tweets, you can see that both Stacy Baker and I were “live tweeting” the session, passing along quotes and summaries from the points that Dawkins was making.

And another.  Brad Williamson took photos of all of the 4-year divisions poster session posters on Friday evening and posted them in a Flickr slideshow.  Since he added the conference hashtag, that slide show is a breeze to find.

A little hashtag like this….just seven characters long….might sound like a small thing, but it’s a big step forward for the NABT organization.  A sign of good things to come as our community steps into the future in order to begin to realize the benefits that social media and online communities can offer to the NABT membership.

What’s next?  Livestreaming NABT talks over the internet?  Communities of new and experienced teachers, tapping into each other’s strengths in online work groups?  The AP Biology community contributing and conversing on this NABT Bio Blog? Professional development webinars?

Richard Dawkins at the NABT

Richard Dawkins was the dinner speaker at this year’s National Association of Biology Teachers Conference. I didn’t attend the dinner (it was $85 – gulp) but I did attend his follow-up Q/A session the next day.

He started his talk with a few of vignette movies from his website, www.richarddawkins.net. These are short (2-3 minute) videos of Dawkins speaking – some of them are from his infamous Christmas Lectures and some are more travelogue vignettes (shot in the Galapagos, for instance). The video vignette on Boobies and Gannets was one of my favorites – describing the “two egg” insurance policy of these birds. Another was a video of a younger Dawkins doing a demonstration with a cannonball pendulum that he holds right up to his face – and then lets go, allowing it to swing in it arc, right back to him, stopping just short of smashing him in the face. A beautiful, living illustration of his faith in science. “Yes you can have faith”, Dawkins says, “but have faith with reason.”

He went on to entertain questions from the audience. Most of the questions were about teaching evolution. Here are a few of them…

Q: What do you say to a student who says of evolution, “I just don’t believe it”?
A: Well, I think you need to explore why they don’t believe it. If their answer is something along the lines of “organisms are just too complex to come from random chance”, then you know that they just have the wrong end of the stick and help them with their misconception. But if the reason is a religious one (as in “my parents or my rabbi tells me it’s wrong”) then you could point out that it’s just random chance that they were born to this family, and have these particular religious beliefs. Another idea that Dawkins said came from last night’s dinner companions is to teach the concepts of evolution without calling it evolution and just “smuggle it in”.

Q: I teach in an inner city LA high school that is 95% Latino Catholic. When I teach evolution, I advise them to keep their faith outside of the classroom. Why do so few people in the United States refuse to accept the principles of evolution, as compared to other countries on the globe. “I see this as an attack on science.”
A: Is it possibly not only an attack on science but an attack on intellectualism itself? There seems to be a political movement in this country that resents intellectual ideas and anyone that might be more intellectual than you? (at which point the entire room broke out in laughter).

Q: How do we address the problem that there is really only one race?
A: Good question. We are a very genetically uniform species. The variation among humans is very, very low. The other misconception here is the Victorian idea of an evolutionary ladder – progression – from ancestral apes to chimpanzees, to black people, to white people. When, really, all humans are exactly equally related to chimpanzees and all mammals are equally related to frogs. The categorization that we all have to deal with on many government forms is total nonsense. “Hispanic?! What does that mean? I encourage everyone to refuse to fill out that portion of the form.”

Q: Sometimes I get students who accept microevolution, but have problems with macroevolution. What do you suggest to combat that?
A: Yes, that’s something that they’ve been taught to say. And, of course, what you say is that macroevolution is what you get when you add up lots of instances of microevolution together. The misconception here is that they think it’s happens over night and have no concept of the vast amounts of time involved. There are various metaphors that you can use to address this – his favorite is to stretch out your arm to the side and, moving from you neck to the tip of your fingers, explain that…. The origin of life is at your neck. The dinosaurs are in the palm of your hand. The first mammal is at your fingernail. The whole of recorded human history falls in the dust of a single stroke of a nail file.

Here they are:

Wickliff, J. L., and R. M. Chasson. 1964. Measurement of photosynthesis in plant tissues using bicarbonate solutions. BioScience 14, no. 3: 32–33.

In this article I saw this graph of a photosynthesis light response curve that got me to thinking:

Last year, the UKanTeach program where I teach acquired a couple of PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) meters to measure photon flux. PAR meters are typically on the expensive side but this model from Apogee runs about $300. I hadn’t taken time to try them out and decided that now was the time.

Yesterday, I went out the north side of Haworth Hall and picked an ivy (Hedera helix) leaf that was growing in deep shade under a shrub.

I picked a shade adapted leaf figuring that a leaf adapted to shade would likely reach photosaturation earlier than a sun adapted leaf. I wasn’t sure whether or not my light source was bright enough to induce photosaturation.

My light source is a clamp shop light with an 8 inch reflector and an 100 watt equivalent compact fluorescent bulb. Actually I found that if I put my meter within a couple of inches of the bulb I can get a flux reading equivalent to a summer’s day. I was sure my light was bright enough for the leaf I had picked.

I modified the technique that I presented here by placing the infiltrated disks in shallow petri dishes instead of plastic cups. I also modified the data collection procedure. Instead of counting disks floating at the end of each minute, I actually attempted to time each disk–a bit of a challenge that I wasn’t quite up to the first time. I should have used a video camera or at least used a computer timer program capable of timing 10 or more “laps” or intervals.

It is real easy to record the first movements of the disks with this technique.

In low light conditions, I started by carefully cutting about 80 disks from one leaf. I then infiltrated ten disks at a time with a dilute bicarbonate solution with a vacuum created with a 10 ml syringe. I placed the 10 sunken disks in separate petri dishes with a total of 30 mls of bicarbonate solution. The dishes with the disks were then placed under a box lid to exclude any light. I then tested 6 of the sets of 10 disks under different light intensities. The data from the highest light intensity are not included because I neglected to use a water heat sink filter to keep the infiltration solution temperature constant. The higher temperatures on this replication affected the outcome. It was only when the light was very close to the petri dish that this was a problem but I need to account for this next time.

Here’s the results:

Note that I’ve plotted plus or minus two estimated Standard Errors for each mean. I was impressed. This is a classic response curve and the parameters of this curve are consistent with data reported in the literature for shade grown English Ivy. I’m more convinced than ever that the floating leaf disk assay is a very valuable tool for a biology teaching laboratory. With this technique students can start their exploration of photosynthesis but the same technique is powerful enough to explore more sophisticated concepts.

From Michael Dougherty:

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) invites you to participate in the 6th Annual DNA Day Essay Contest! It is open to students in grades 9-12.

DEADLINE: MARCH 7, 2011 at 5:00 PM EST

Please visit http://www.ashg.org/education/dnaday.shtml for the rules, rubric, and more information.

2011 Essay questions:

Option1: In 2010, a major discovery in genetics research found that the DNA of some modern humans contains small amounts of Neanderthal DNA. Briefly explain this finding and discuss its relevance to human ancestry and evolution.

Option 2: A number of companies offer genetic testing directly to consumers, bypassing the involvement of physicians and genetic counselors. Discuss whether you think this is a good idea or not. You might focus on medical, ethical, legal, or social dimensions of this issue.

A 1st, 2nd, 3rd place will be chosen for each question. Winning students will receive:

1st Place Winners: $400.00 + Teacher receives a $2,000 grant for laboratory genetics equipment
2nd Place Winners: $250.00
3rd Place Winners: $150.00

Please expect another email in January 2011 when the submission site is live. Questions? Please email Angie Wong (awong@ashg.org).