Microscopes are cool! They are tons of fun but they are only fun if you know how to get them focused. I can actually remember looking in the microscope in middle school and pretending that I could see things. Everyone else seemed to be able to see cool stuff so I just went with it. I drew what my lab partner drew. Focusing a microscope is a surprisingly difficult task for middle school kids. Maybe it is the fact that it takes patience, practice, and perseverance- traits that are in short supply with 12-year-olds. Whatever it is, a few years back I realized that after our 2 week microscope unit only about 1/2 of my students could reliably and repeatedly focus a microscope. I realized that, like my middle school self, they had been relying on their partner to focus for them. Which was a solid plan until we switched partners.
I knew that I had to do something. The microscope (unfortunately) is one of few authentic tools that we use in our classroom. I was determined to have all of my students able to focus the thing. Enter: the Microscope Performance Assessment. During which I stood next to each student and watched them focus and then looked in the microscope to check to see if they were successful. Meanwhile the rest of my students were working on some type of independent microscope lab. It was awful! I was bored out of my mind, it made them nervous to have me stand next to them, some of them took forever to focus, kids would be absent, kids doing the lab would need my help, some kids would finish early. It would always end up taking weeks to get to all of my 120+ students. I would spend every spare minute of my day making kids focus the microscope. But they knew how to focus the microscope! Then we got iPads. Students immediately realized that they could hold the camera of their iPad up to the eyepiece of the microscope. Sometimes the photos came out great. I did a quick search to see if there was a way to make the photos always come out great without spending a bajillion dollars on fancy cameras that connect the microscope to the iPads. We have iPads, but it is a public school. I found this blog which recommended a $2 app called fast camera. Still too expensive for me but I knew that the key was taking pictures quickly. I asked my students (yes, I was researching this in the middle of class while they practiced with the microscopes) if they knew of a free app that takes photos quickly. Their response was "Well, if you just hold the camera button down it takes a bunch of photos quickly". They always know how to use their iPads more effectively than I do. Problem solved! Now, instead of the Microscope Performance Assessment we have the Microscope Focus Challenge.
These are the directions that I gave them: The Challenge: Prove with photo evidence that you are the best microscope focuser on team! You will focus your microscope on 2 different prepared slides. Use your iPad camera to take photos of your specimens focused on Low, Medium and High Power. Your teacher will select finalists and your classmates will vote on who wins the title of Best Microscope Focuser! Prizes TBA The Rules: This is an individual challenge. You must focus your own microscope by yourself! You can use any directions pages and you can ask for advice from your lab partner.
I picked finalists and had the students look at them in schoology and vote using google forms.
This is the winner:
Since it does involve some talent with using the camera I also let them have their partner take the photo for them if they were not good at taking photos. I admittedly am terrible at taking photos with the iPad. They were able to complete this in one class period. They passed it in to me via Schoology and it took me less than an hour to look at all of my students work to see if they can focus the microscope. I had a few kids insist that they couldn't use the camera and I was able to look in their microscopes to check their work. It was much easier than looking in every single microscope! Now when we are using microscopes in class my students can focus and take photos of what they see.
Ok so first of all, I did not come up with this idea on my own (I wish I did, but I didn't). In the spring I went to the NSTA conference in Boston. Where I heard @mr_graba talk about this project and how he used Twitter in his high school biology classroom. It is actually a very cool story of how "real scientists" started to interact with his students, but that is his story, not mine. Here is a blog post that tells that story.
I thought that the project sounded awesome and I wanted to try it out. I am not comfortable with turning my 7th graders loose on Twitter just yet (maybe I will get there someday, but I am not there yet). I knew that I needed to make our own version of Organelle Wars. So here it is: The Premise: The Nucleus needs to retire. Who is going to replace the nucleus as The President of the Cell? The Project: 1.Students were assigned an organelle and had to research the structure and function of the organelle (so far, a boring old cell project). 2.Then they had to campaign for their organelle to be elected "President of the Cell" (getting fun now). 3.They also had to create smear campaigns against other organelles. This is where the students totally bought-in to this project! It is also the part of the project that ensures that they learn about other organelles in the cell, not just their assigned organelle (best cell project ever!).
I realized that this project was different from any other cell project when on the first day of research, in more than one of my classes, students started darting around the room making alliances with other organelles that they worked together with in the cell. They were planning who they would smear and how they would team up! They were doing this on the sly when they thought I wasn't looking. It even got a little out of hand and I had to remind them that they should be researching, not making alliances! I have never seen students this excited to learn about cell parts. On day 2 of the project at the conclusion of research stage I went around the room and asked each group to tell one thing about why their organelle is important. One boy raised his hand and said "This project is impossible because all of the organelles are important. The cell needs them all." All of the kids nodded and I my teacher heart fluttered to see them reach this understanding so early in the project. Parts of the Project: Campaign Posters- I showed some examples of political posters, we discussed the elements of successful posters, and I let them have at it. Posters were hung in one of the main hallways of the school.
Campaign Advertisement- We are a 1:1 iPad classroom so I decided that instead of speeches, we would use the iPad to shoot a political ad. We watched some samples, then they storyboarded their ad, then they filmed. The ads had to be 1 minute long.
Discussion Boards- I set up discussion boards in our Schoology class. This is where the smearing took place. I gave them some guidelines for how many times they needed to post and what made a "good smear" (not just saying "ribosomes stink" but actually referring to their structure and/or function "Who needs protein anyway? Ribosomes stink"). They took it to another level and started making memes. I love memes! Here is some of what went on in the discussion boards:
The discussion boards were fun for the kids and helped me identify misconceptions. We have since moved on and I introduced a new project to my students the other day. The first question they asked was if they were going to get to make smear campaigns again. They loved it! And I think they will remember it.
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