I love the excitement and wonder kids have when their eyes are opened to enormous microscopic world they didn't know existed. There are so many amazing organisms that are fascinating and beautiful to look at.
Typically when we do a microscope lab it involves the student drawing what they see, and labeling what I ask them to. Two things usually happen. The first is that the kid never finds the organism and ends up drawing an air bubble or dust (though they are truly fascinated by it). The second is that the drawing looks nothing like the organism and is just a bunch of lines and/or dots.
I hate this.
It's so difficult to grade and makes me really question the learning value from the experience. How do I really know they observed what they were supposed to and understand the science concept behind it?
This year, I tried something new:
We're digitizing our microscope labs this year #edtech #gofaconpower #biology pic.twitter.com/IBiwfMjLuf— Mr. Orre's Class (@OrreBiology) October 13, 2016
I had them take pictures with their phones instead of drawing it. Then instead of labeling it, I had them label it using Google Draw. From here they could save it as an image on a shared Google Drive folder, and then upload it to their blogs. I made a quick little how to video that I put on our learning management system, Canvas. Here it is:
Check out the pictures they took: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-gw9N2jXYUsclpGNGNMV0swTzA?usp=sharing
Here's what happened:
The microscope work went really quick. Kids loved it. They were excited by the organisms, and the photos they took. When they got to the labeling part though, it took forever. Literally the lab took a week to accomplish. The kids did was really great on the labeling part, and I think they understood what they were looking at much better than before, but I had to cut out one of my labs we did the following week. That part was a little frustrating.
As always, the choices we make always have trade offs. This is a classic quality vs quantity issue, and I still kind of hate this lab. Though maybe a little less. Next year, I think I may need to be really strategic about what cells I have them draw knowing that I'm probably going to get fewer, but maybe better looking analyses. Perhaps I can also share pictures of them to look at without actually labeling. Or they can upload them to their blog and discuss, without using Google Draw to label.
Nevertheless, the blog posts do look really good. It's definitely MUCH better to grade than before and I feel like I can assess learning better than before. Plus there are a lot of digital skills gained from the experience.
Check out some of the student work!
http://rannazbioblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/microscopic-organism-lab.html
http://nataliebioblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/microscopic-organism-lab.html
https://jeffyx.blogspot.com/2016/10/microscopic-organism-analysis.html
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