Tag Archives: biology

A classic Biology practical, done better.

Video 17 May, 2014 Alom Shaha Leave a comment

If you’ve studied biology in school, there’s a good chance you’ve tried to count the bubbles of gas emerging from a piece of pondweed called Elodea placed in a beaker of water. This has been a standard practical used in biology teaching for decades and is still widely used. This video shows how it can be be done better using a different plant, Cabomba, and how using different approaches allows students to learn about different aspects of photosynthesis.

Get support materials and see the other films in this series from Science and Plants for Schools.

Practical Work

Using Algal Balls to Investigate Photosynthesis

Video 14 May, 2014 Alom Shaha Leave a comment

As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we’re big fans of using demonstrations for science teaching and have made a bunch of films about how and why to use them in the classroom. Our latest films are different – they’re about class practicals and we hope they show how these particular practicals could be used to teach specific aspects of Biology, as well as demonstrating how practicals in general might be approached to ensure their effectiveness.

The film above shows various ways to use “algal balls” in Biology practicals – they’re fun to make and a fantastic tool for doing quantitative investigations of photosynthesis. There’s more information and detailed instructions over at the SAPS website.

We’re grateful to the lovely people at Science & Plants for Schools (SAPS) for asking us to make the films – we had a blast working with them and staff from the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education.

Demonstration, Get Set Demonstrate

Modelling digestion using visking tubing

Video 20 January, 2014 Alom Shaha 3 Comments

This is the second Biology film we’ve made as part of the “Get, Set, Demonstrate” project. One of the films we were asked to look at was “Making Poo: The Digestive System” but we felt that this was not what we would strictly call a “demonstration” of digestion (since no actual digestion takes place), but rather an illustration of the process. Instead, we chose to make a film about using Visking tubing to model digestion and use it to explore the reasons why you might choose to carry out a demonstration of an activity which can be (and often is) done as a class practical.

This film was produced for the Get Set Demonstrate project. Click through for teaching notes, and take the pledge to perform a demonstration to your students on Demo Day, 20th March 2014.

Demonstration, Get Set Demonstrate

Pluck Dissection

Video 15 January, 2014 Alom Shaha 8 Comments

As a Physics teacher, I’ve got a long list of classic demonstrations at my disposal for use in teaching everything from pressure to electricity to conservation of energy. I’ve had to teach some Biology in the past and I think it’s fair to say that Biologists are not so well resourced when it comes to demonstrations.

A large part of the reason for doing demonstrations in class, I think, is to get our students to look closely at the world, to really observe it in detail. In Biology, that means taking a close look at living things and the components of which they’re made. This video is unlike any of the other demonstration films we’ve made so far, but it was one of the most interesting I’ve worked on – I came away convinced that if I teach Biology again, I’d definitely make more use of dissection as a teaching tool.