Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Wanted: The Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer beetle. These insidious insects are wreaking havoc on trees across America. Beetle Detectives, a site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has put out an APB for some science-minded sleuths to snoop around local flora to see if they can spot these bugs. If they do, your students can report the beetles’ whereabouts via the Beetle Detectives website. The site ranks classrooms according to how many reports they submit, allowing kids to win bragging rights over less-observant gumshoes.

The site includes vital information about both the Asian longhorn and emerald ash borer. It also shows several photos depicting the telltale signs of infestation — visible exit holes in the tree bark, a receding canopy starting at the top of the tree, and vertical fissures in the bark are just a few indications that a tree has been infiltrated. Grab your magnifying glass and head into the woods to help put a stop to these voracious vermin.

Beetle Detectives

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Contribute to a national scientific study with The Great Backyard Bird Count

BY REBECCAH HAINES

The Great Backyard Bird Count (February 18-21) lets your students be “real” scientists simply by identifying and counting birds. The GBBC is an important source of nationwide bird data. Sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab, the GBBC encourages bird watchers of all levels of expertise to spend as little as 15 minutes identifying and counting birds in their backyards (or schoolyards as the case may be), then submitting their counts to the website. The data collected from the GBBC is used by scientists studying population trends and patterns in wintering birds. This data can then be used to do things like designate new protected habitats.

There are several GBBC-related activities you can do with your students. Before counting, you can teach your students how to identify the 10 most common species. After counting, take a look at previous years’ data, and discuss what you see — patterns, trends, conclusions — all great critical thinking practice!

By participating with your students in the GBBC, you’ll be helping scientists gather important data, and you’ll be giving your students the feeling that they’re doing something real — and, you get to take them outside to do it!

Great Backyard Bird Count

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BY BILL FERRIS

Okay, so NASA hasn’t found extraterrestrial life. They did find something pretty cool, though — a microorganism “able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.”

What this means is that life can spring from more than just carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. More broadly, it’s a fundamental shift in how and where scientists can look for new forms of life, opening a lot more possibilities of the sorts of extraterrestrial life NASA might hope to find. More locally, your district may have to update its science textbooks in the near future.

Science teachers, how will this affect your teaching? Do you plan to share this announcement with your class? Read the full story and leave a comment about how this discovery will alter your teaching.

NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

It is 2:45pm on a Friday. You’re teaching your students about natural selection using the classic example of the dark and light morphs of the moths. Not unexpectedly, your audience is beginning to drift. What to do? Here’s a suggestion — use the images and videos at ARKive.org to spice up your presentation.

As the tag line of this website suggests, at ARKive you will find images and videos of living things. Not just animals either — there are sections for plants and fungi too! The mission of the website is to highlight the world’s biodiversity in order to stimulate conservation. The images are stunning, and in addition to them, you also get information on each organism — a thorough description, and even a trip on Google Earth to view its habitat. Best of all, these images and videos are free for educational use.

So how can you use this in the classroom? Well, back to our moth-morph scenario. There is a handy dandy education section that includes PowerPoints and related handouts that use the images and videos from ARKive. And, they happen to be focused on Darwin, his voyage on the Beagle, and his theory of natural selection. Peppered moths, here we come! In addition to the PowerPoints and handouts (called “Learning Resources“), there are also educational games geared toward teaching about animal survival, animal habitats, and animal-life stages.

Finally, this site would be spectacular for your students to use as a research base. You can be assured the information is factual, and the pictures and videos are more reliable than what they might find by searching YouTube or Google.

Overall, ARKive is a wonderful site and you will certainly find it useful, no matter what grade level you teach.

ARKive.org

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

To you, fall may be exciting due to the return of football, the cooler weather, and the changing foliage.  However, it can also be a season for celebrating science.  Everyone loves a good holiday — a reason to celebrate, let loose, and have some fun.  The following fall science festivals can allow you such an opportunity in your classroom in the upcoming weeks.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

With more than 250,000 scientific photos on hand, CalPhotos is a potentially incredible resource for students working on a project and in need of some visual elements. The site contains photos submitted by a variety of people and organizations in the scientific community. You can perform focused searches or random searches. In either case, your efforts are often rewarded with a handful of wonderful images. The internal search engine also has various levels of sophistication, so you could use scientific terms or specific geographical locations to narrow your search. But that’s not all.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Ever wonder what it would be like to live the life of a wolf in the wild? Well, the free-to-play WolfQuest is about as close as you’re going to get. WolfQuest puts you in the role of a lonely wolf in the wild with two things on your mind: survive and start a family. Along the way you’ll learn about how a wolf perceives the world around him with “scent view” which shows trails of recent creatures and other territorial markers. You can hunt everything from bull elk down to hares (although I was never able to get my teeth around a hare — those little guys are fast!).

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BY: REBECCAH HAINES

Alright, so, maybe my title is a touch misleading. I certainly don’t mean to say that you can actually perform heart surgery without years and years of training, but with Open Heart you and your students can try it out virtually, and learn a lot about how the heart works in the process.

One of the main reasons I adore this website is that it is chock full of interactive components to help teach about the structure and function of the heart. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Nothing creeps me out like eye trauma. The very idea gives me the shakes. Being a humble English major, I was shocked to find out that some science-minded students actually have to dissect eyeballs. I personally have nothing against dissecting animals in class, but I’m having a hard time even writing about other people slicing open an eye. That’s why I’m relieved, kinda, that there’s a virtual eye dissection app online. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Sometimes I struggle to find quality educational multimedia elements. They either aren’t well made or don’t have much tangible educational value. This, however, is not the case over at nature.com in their multimedia section. You’ll find video presentations here on everything from self repairing rubber molecules to a study of honey bee genomes. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

When I went over genetics in my biology class in high school, it was Punnett Squares, a bit of Darwin, and not much else. Fast forward more than a decade and the field of genetics has grown exponentially. Things like the human genome project have furthered our understanding of the building blocks of all life in amazing ways. But how do we take all this new knowledge and get it out of the professional scientist’s hands and into the classroom? One answer is the website Scitable, a giant repository of all things genetics. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

We had the LEARN NC staff retreat last week, and one of the subjects that received a good deal of discussion was efforts to promote STEM education resources. Seeing as we’re not scientists here at Instructify, the best way we can promote STEM is to shine our light on groups of scientists who are fighting the good fight. In that spirit, we direct your attention to BioED Online, offered by the good folks at Baylor University, is an online repository of lesson plans, teaching resources, full blown presentations and interactive contests for students.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origins of Species 150 years ago, the Galapagos Islands have always been of particular interests to scientist and environmentalist alike. Back then the diversity of species as they evolved in relative isolation formed some of the basis of Darwin’s ground-breaking and controversial scientific hypothesis.

Fast forward a century and a half and a new debate surrounds the famous archipelago and its renowned environmental treasure. Like the rest of the planet, the Galapagos is trying to deal with an ever increasing human population in relationship to a finite amount of resources locally available; it’s a delicate balancing act in an area with a fragile ecosystem.

In order to document and present the challenges the islands face, a website call Living Galapagos has been created with a wealth of information about the current situation in the Galapagos. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do you remember the penguin renaissance of 2005-2007 when every movie was about antarctic fowl going surfing, doing a dance, or marching around? I think I found myself rooting for the leopard seal after a while.

Penguins’ overexposure has subsided since then, as has my irritation. That means I’m finally in a good enough frame of mind to look at Penguinscience, a science-education site that introduces students to Adelie penguins.

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