Evolution Animation

Here's an excellent animation that shows the history of the Earth, and evolution in all it's glory. I'm a science teacher, so I love stuff like this.



It's produced by John Kyrk and his website is packed with even more great flash animations for teaching GCSE and A Level Biology. Including meiosis and mitosis, cell structure and photosynthesis. Thanks to Clay Burrells blog for the link to this site.

And while on the subject of Evolution, and not really enough to justify a post of it's own, here's some cool Darwin/Obama mashup images from Mikero.com

More on his site, and you can buy Tshirts too! Proceeds go to the National Centre for Science Education in the US.

Build your wild self

Here's a fun activity I used with my Science students the other week when we were looking at Science and ICT. It would fit in nicely into a lesson about adaptations, or variety of life.

With the Build Your Wild Self you can create an online version of yourself - then add animal parts such as antlers, wings, tentacles, different mouthparts and other odd body parts.



What I asked the students to then do was to take a screen grab of their creation and paste it into Word (or you could use the camera tool and grab it into IWB software).

Once in Word, we can start looking at our animal scientifically. I asked them to think about what their animal would eat. Where might it live? Based on its body parts how did it find food? Did it hunt? Think about each of the body parts they had added and describe their purpose.

You could also open this up into a larger creative-writing task and write a story about their animal.

If you like Build Your Wild Self, you'll also like Switch Zoo, which can be used in a similar way.

Have fun!

Tree of Life

Not that I need to take advantage of a Snow Day to mess about on the internet, but since the UK has ground to a halt because of the weather, I've been surfing.

From the Bad Science forums I found a link to an excellent video of the Tree of Life. This is taken from a BBC show about Charles Darwin broadcast to celebrate his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and was produced in association with The Wellcome Trust.

The video of the tree of life is available in YouTube version, but you can also download a copy for your own use. It's licensed under a Creative Commons licence so you can use it in your schools as long as you attribute the source and don't use it commercially.

There is also an interactive Tree of Life which allows you to trace the ancestry of many different creatures and also makes it easy to find the common ancestors between pairs of animals. So if you want to find the common ancestor between Man and Penguin, then you can (something called Amniota, in case you were wondering).

This is a beta version and so will develop over time. Again you can download a standalone version if you want to use it in schools.

Science/Biology teachers who are looking for a resource to use when teaching evolution or diversity of life should definitely check it out. And the creative commons licence means you could even get the students to put it into movie maker (or similar) and record their own narration over the top.

Biology on the IWB: 10 Quick Ideas

Here are some quick ideas for using an IWB for Biology teaching.

1. Sequence the stages in Mitosis or Meiosis using images or statements

2. Drag and Drop animals and arrows to create Food Chains and Webs

3. Label diagrams of the various body systems using images captured from the Internet or from the gallery.

4. Investigate genetic crossing using drag and drop punnet squares. In Smart you could use the Infinite Cloner on the B and b, or just stack several letters on top of each other so when you drag one down, the rest remain.

5. Use the camera to capture pictures from the internet to illustrate a lesson on the dangers of alcohol and smoking. Or use the Inside Body powerpoint presentations from the ASE site as a source of images.

6. Sort foods into 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' foods, then use as basis for a discussion about whether there is actually any such thing as an unhealthy food.

7. Simulate how to use a quadrat before going out into the field using random dots and a square annotation, or the square spotlight tool.

8. Combine the IWB with a digital microscope to demonstrate and label slides as a whole class.

9. Keyword Plenary – pupils choose keywords from a selection, drag them into the middle of the screen and use them to explain one thing they’ve learned from the lesson.

10. Use a visualiser (Document camera) when carrying out dissections of the heart or flowers to make it easier for the whole class to see what is going on. Use the camera tool to capture images during the various stages of the dissection and add labels to the images. A cheaper alternative would be to use a webcam clamped to a retort stand