Month: November 2016

I’ve been fortunate to work with some really excellent educators. These fine teachers have developed materials that were piloted with students this last year. The materials are now being made available for free to any teacher who wants to use them.

The first materials available are the Biology modules. These are high quality biology resources that a teacher could use, or adapt for use, in their very own classroom. The materials are all being made available through a Moodle site.

ATEP (Articulated Technological Educational Pathways) Project was the result of a National Science Foundation Grant. The group put together resources for Biology, ICT (Information and Communication Technology), and MMT (Modeling and Manufacturing Technology).

(In case you are interested, my part of the project was to upgrade the “look and feel” of the Moodle site that ATEP was using. I also did some training on using Moodle. That training included developing resources to help instructors use Moodle as well as providing guidance on how to structure material within Moodle. However, the implementation presented for public use and consumption is decidedly “plain vanilla”. This was intentionally done to make sure that users didn’t need to have special themes or plug-ins installed).

Please head over to the ATEP site and check out the resources. All of the courses are available for download and installation into your very own Moodle instance.

Start with the Biology Course. Biology has two modules (A & B). Module A includes the following sections:

• An Introduction
• The Design Process
• What is Biotechnology
• Biology Review
• Biomanufacturing: The Story of Insulin
• The Effects of Insulin
• Biomanufacturing
• Protein Purification
• Solving the Insulin Problem
• Bioreactor Training
• Product Redesign and Maximizing Product Production

There are exclusive teacher resources in each of the sections.

You can register for the site with an email. (This is done solely to provide a way to download the materials. Emails are not being collected for use in any other way).

There is a “Download Course” which has links to the files to download so that you can install the courses on your own Moodle site.)

Well, the wonderful people that I work with have done it again. This time, they’ve rolled out the Frayer Model in Moodle. Once again, the Database activity forms the base for this work.  The students can then enter relevant information (Concept, Definition, Image, Example, and Non-Example) to create a Frayer model.

Here are the fields for the student to complete:

Students enter all of the required fields (those with a * ). Once they do, a Frayer Model will be created for them.

When the student places a mouse over one of the fields, the information is brought forward.

Since this is a Database activity, the work that students do can be shared with the entire class (or not). If you want all students to share, simply leave Approval set to “No” (in the Entries section). Conversely, if you want each student to only see their own work, set “Approval required” to “Yes” (and don’t approve anything).

Here is Mr. Chris Kenniburg explaining the process.