Teaching Biology in the digital age: Potential of online resources for the student experiment Does Clove Oil Inhibit Mold ?

Just in my last year of my extended undergraduate degree we were given an email account, we had access to the web and our favorite lectures were delivered by a new tool called power-point.

Interestingly, since I still work in the university environment, most of my communication with peers is still via email, we use the web to quickly access information and presentations are still delivered via power-point. So even though there has been  a lag more than 15 years, my ability to harness some of the new and very exciting ways  tools for learning and teaching has stalled.Shortly, I will be heading back into the high-school room to teach biology and Japanese, and I am keen to explore ways of keeping students engaged and encouraging higher order learning through online resources.

Blogs, wikis and and web pages are not completely foreign experiences for me. I have briefly played with blogs in my personal life, but not beyond using it as a substitution for a hand written diary. I  used a wiki about 5 years ago. My friends and I were planning an expedition to Western Australia, we were not going to meet up until we got to Broome so we used wiki to share ideas and information. Again this was just text based. Fifteen years ago - my first job out of uni was to develop a web page for the Process Manufacturing Industries Training Board. It turned out that this meant re-typing all of the photocopies that would normally be sent out to students, and having it converted to HTML. In summary my previous forays into using these technologies has been at the substitution level. I will be learning how to find and apply more tools in the coming months and years.

For today's reflection on the use of these three medium's in the classroom, I am just focusing on  blogs, and I am going to try and set up a blog page that could be used to teach a topic for year 11 Biology.

Today's topic is inspired by Dr Richard Walding from Griffith University who has put together a list of resources for senior biology teachers in Queensland.The purpose of the lesson is to teach students how to design an Extended Experimental Investigation (EEI).

 Killing Mold with Clove Oil

http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

Students are asked to design an experiment that tests the theory that clove oil can prevent black mold growth. This will be both a laboratory based experiment and then extended to a real life situation where moldy walls in different houses are treated with different mold inhibitors and the progress either photographed or filmed and uploaded to a live feed. First a quick explanation of  the microbial life cycle (substitution).

First, students should do some basic research online to find references online using both grey material and google scholar.

Then they could grow mold on bread, put the mold in solution and then place on agar plates which are then incubated for a few days (start on a Monday). Then they would place a few drops of clove oil solution on to a filter paper square. Place it on the agar plate and then measure the effect on the colony. Various concentrations of clove oil, and a control should be used. (courtesy of Richard Walding http://seniorbiology.com/eei.html).

Students could then find moldy walls (either their own or could hook up with a school in the tropics) and set a time lapse experiment using the best dilution of clove oil determined in the first experience. A time lapse app such as  https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/timelapse/id301050966?mt=8 could be used by students to film the progress of the mold treatment.

They could set up a wiki where they could share their photos and their thoughts on the mold treatment perhaps coming up with different ways mold could be treated