These are my thoughts about college counseling, science, and the environment.
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This article from ESI, “The Online Power Journal of Africa,” discusses the pros and cons of renewable energy sources across the continent. It’s a nice summary of the points made in ESS Topic 3.3 – Energy Resources. It’s also particularly relevant for us here in Tanzania, considering the seasonal difficulties TanEsCo has meeting demand for…
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Welcome back from the October break! I know you’re all excited to be back in class after a week of sleeping in and lazing around with your friends and families. Hopefully, the following lab experiment will ease everyone back into the routine of school… The processes of photosynthesis and respiration are essentially inverse reactions. Photosynthesis…
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Follow the link below to read about Bill Gates’ take on future developments in food production, specifically concerning the global increase in meat consumption over the past couple of decades. Here’s what the illustrious Mr Gates has to say about the issue on his personal blog, The Gates Notes: Meat consumption worldwide has doubled in…
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Help me create more engaging and meaningful learning experiences for you by responding to the questions embedded in the form below. Responses are anonymous.
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Biogeochemical cycles trace the movement of matter and nutrients through living organisms (“bio-“), planetary systems (“geo-“) and chemical reactions (“chemical”) throughout every part of Earth. The carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle are possibly the 2 most important biogeochemical cycles on Earth. Here are a few fun videos to help you learn about these two essential…
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I just stumbled upon this course at Learner.org, called “The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science.” I haven’t had the time yet to fully explore it, but it looks to be a tremendous resource for our class. I recommend you bookmark this page in your browser and come back to it whenever we…
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I found this presentation while looking through some stuff over at Slideshare.net, which is a pretty good resource for school notes if you haven’t found it yet. The teacher for this class includes almost everything that we need to know about the differences between the movement of energy and nutrients through and within ecosystems, respectively.…
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I’ve heard this question a bunch of times already this week, and it’s only Tuesday morning! If you’ve been paying attention in class, you should already have a pretty good idea of what will be on the quiz. If you haven’t been paying attention, I’m going to give you a couple of hints in this…
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For homework, please watch the following video from Mr Anderson’s Bozeman Biology channel on Youtube and complete the Google form I sent you. I’ve also embedded the form below the video, but you can only see it when you are logged into your IST gmail account.
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Mars has always fascinated humans, and continues to do so. Here’s a little tidbit about our red neighbor, courtesy of NASA and the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24287207
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I’ll add more later, but for the moment, please use this lab report planner to develop the investigation you will design into photosynthesis and respiration in Philodendron hastatum and Sansevieria trifasciata. Below is a link to the planner as a Google form. When you complete the planner and click ‘submit,’ I will receive a digital…
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This week in grade 9 science, we’ll start the process of developing your investigations into photosynthesis and respiration in Sansevieria trifasciata and Philodendron hastatum plants. The first steps of that process are a couple of preliminary experiment to establish an understanding of these essential processes. The experiment below is the one we’ll be doing in…
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Well, today was a little wacky, with no electricity or projector, class photographs in the middle of one class, and virtually no air circulating in my room to make for a hot hot hot day at school. Add in the noise and distraction of holding class in the courtyard, and we have….well, we have a…
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Plants and animals are both eukaryotes, meaning they have distinct nuclei. (Bacteria, by contrast, are prokaryotes, which means they don’t have a nicely organized nucleus.) Plants and animal cells have many other similarities: ribosomes, mitochondria, chromatin, cell membranes, smooth and rough endoplasmic reticula (ER), vacuoles, and Golgi complexes, among some other organelles we’re not studying…
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Check out some of these wacky – but real! – investigations by genuine, getting-paid-to-do-it scientists! If you’ve got an oddball interest, there just may be research funding in your future…. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/09/13/ig-nobel-awards-salute-sciences-wacky-side/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+discovercrux+%28The+Crux%29&utm_content=FeedBurner#.Uj-_prxPolo
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Here’s an intriguing article about research into a new method of fertilizing food crops. Nitrogen is one of the key elements required for plant growth, but because it’s not found everywhere on the planet, people use nitrogen fertilizers to boost yields in areas with low nitrogen levels. Unfortunately, the Haber process (the industrial process of…
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Now that we’ve spent some time getting to know our key vocabulary in the biology sequence, let’s start to delve a little deeper into the links and relationships among those words. The Cell Theory is one of the foundational ideas behind all of biology, and it is something you must be familiar with before starting…
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I was researching something about evolution for one of my grade 9 classes the other day when I stumbled across this series of infographics about water resources. We’ve just begun our exploration of Topic 2 – Ecosystems, but these infographics do a really nice job of putting the amount of water on our planet into…
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The other day during a biology lesson, some grade 9 students asked me how long ago people came to Australia, so I pulled up a map showing the migration of humans out of Africa. The dates and routes taken by different groups of people sparked quite a bit of interest and conversation with those students.…
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image source: filebox.vt.edu Welcome to the biology unit, kids! I’ve added a couple of helpful documents to this post, which you will want to refer to as we move through our unit on the organization of life on Earth. The first document, G9 Biology Vocabulary, is an outline of the major concepts in this unit.…
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