Using the Inquiry Page in a high school classroom
Anuradha Murphy
(a-datta@bigfoot.com)
(ready to use)
ASK
Partner Projects
| GK-12 Teaching Fellowships |
Subject Areas
| Education, Educational Technology, Information Science, Science |
Grade Levels
| 10, 11, 12, Undergraduate, Graduate, Informal |
Unit Keywords
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GK-12, education technology, high school, inquiry |
Rationale of the Unit
| I have used Inquiry Units to promote the use of freely-available computation and visualization tools in a rural high school life sciences class. This Unit contains a review of my experiences with the Inquiry Page. I have also included information on how to access some of the tools we used. |
Background:
I am a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am working with a Computational Biology group in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology under Prof. Eric Jakobsson. In our lab we examine sequence-function correlations of ion channels and conduct computer simulation studies of water and ion channel behavior.
I am currently taking a year off from graduate school (due to family
commitments) and working part-time as a graduate assistant in the GK-12 program. My duties in the GK-12 program involve working with a
life-sciences teacher and her two tenth grade classes in Oakland (a
rural community located near Arcola, IL). I am using some freely
available computational and visualization tools to enhance the students' curriculum and expose them to recent scientific developments. The Inquiry Page has proved to be an easy-to-use interface for communication between the students, their teacher, and myself, and a place for us to post and look up class material outside of the limited classroom hours.
Resources:
Computation and visualization tools used for teaching science can be found through the GK-12 website at: http://gk12.ncsa.uiuc.edu/resources.html
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Activities:
I created a Community Inquiry Lab (CIL) on the high school class I am working with, named "Life Sciences at Oakland High School". All the relevant Inquiry Units I made for the class can be accessed from this site.
The students obtained logins, learned to use the Inquiry Page, and created their own Inquiry Units during one class hour. They commented on how easy it was to write their own Pages and upload their Power Point presentations onto their units. At the time, their topic of discussion was angiosperms (more information on this can be found in the Inquiry Unit titled "Angiosperms"). They found it very useful to be able to access each others Power Point presentations and critique them outside of class hours (the teacher assigned them extra-credit points for this).
In a later class I introduced the Biology Student Workbench, a freely-available web-based computational biology tool. I included a Power Point tutorial on use of the Workbench and uploaded it to an Inquiry Unit titled "Photosynthesis". The tutorial walks the students through an exercise that involves: a) searching for rubisco (ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase) sequences from various plants, b) examining and aligning the obtained protein/amino acid sequences, c) studying the alignments and constructing phylogenetic trees from the results, and d) examining the phylogenetic trees for expected/unexpected characteristics.
The students will begin to study their next topic, respiration, next week. I am in the process of creating an Inquiry Unit with more relevant information on the process of respiration. |
| During class discussions on use of the Inquiry Page, the general consensus was that the site was easy to use. The 10th grade students at Oakland High School had varying familiarity with using computers and the world wide web, but everyone was able to create their own Inquiry Units and upload their Power Point presentations. The computer lab teachers were very enthusiastic about the students using computers to learn science! |
| The Inquiry Page has been very useful to me in my interactions with my high school students. Through the use of Inquiry Units, the students, their teacher, and I have been able to store and access relevant class information (such as student questions, class announcements, important url's, Power Point presentations, etc.) outside of limited class hours. |
Credits & Acknowledgements
| I thank the GK-12 program for giving me the opportunity to work with the students at Oakland High School. It has been a wonderful experience to share some of the knowledge I gained during my graduate studies with teachers and high school students. |
Uploaded Files:
InquiryPagepresentation.ppt
FinalGK12Presentation.ppt
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