Extreme Biology 2010-11 Reflections and Future

This year in Biology was surely extraordinary, and I’m glad your last year was with us.  This blog was a huge factor of my learning this year.  This blog helped me truly understand the biology field.  I am really interested in Marine Biology.  One of my favorite post was from Monica, which was the “Invisible Predator of the Depth.” This post helped me understand a new type of Jellyfish that i would of most likely never of heard of, and known about its ability to change colors.  Even Aurora’s post on why do Fish Swim in Schools was highly fascinating to me.  I learned that a small fish bonded with other small fish could make it look intimidating.  This blog this year wasn’t just something i had to do daily, it was a source of information that my classmates were able to research, and pass on information to the whole internet.  My favorite part of this year was how we were able to do things that i would of never done anywhere else.  This includes the Dogfish Dissection, which was probably the high point of my year.  Being able to study a shark, which is my favorite animal, without having to look at a computer screen was amazing.  We were able to see the adaptions a shark had for survival, for example a shark having two livers to keep it buoyant. 

Thank you Ms. Baker for an extraordinary year in biology!

Thanks to Ms. Baker, I was exposed to blogging. I never wrote for a blog before in my life, but Ms. Baker taught me all the necessary qualities a blog post needs. You need to lure readers in, put your personal opinion in the blog backed by facts, and have a creative aspect to your blog, such as a picture or video.
Not only do I blog for Extreme Biology, but I maintain my own blog, Green Science, on Scitable.com, and I have Ms. Baker to thank for it.
Extreme Biology was a huge help when it came to reviewing class work and preparing for tests. The weekly podcasts also helped me understand the concepts we learned in class.
I learned a lot of cool facts while blogging and reading my classmate’s blogs. Since the blogs are written on a high school level, they are easy to understand.
Biology was my favorite subject this year. We did a lot of hands on experiments, such as the Dogfish Dissection, and Ms. Baker made it fun to learn. Unlike many of my other classes, I enjoyed attending biology every day and I realized that maybe one day, I would like to pursue a career in the field of science.
Thank you again MS Baker. Good luck next year! WE WILL ALL MISS YOU!

This year in biology was a blast. It was interesting to see how blogging works. I also felt like I obtained a lot from blogging. It was a great source of time management, team work, and scientific writing. I enjoyed and learned many things, to name a few: Fenecs, Jellyfish, lighting bugs, and even learned things from the scitable blogs like third hand smoke exsists. The blog was fun and cool way to learn biology. In the class room I was always intrigued, whether we dissecting sharks or flowers, taking a walk into the wilderness for water, experimenting with hela cells, or studying Rooaches I have enjoyed it all. Thank you Miss Baker your class has given me a general love and liking for science and have generally had an awesome year. 
It was interesting to eat Crickets and Worms too. 

Thanks  Joe We will miss you!!!
 

The blog meant a lot to me, it helped me understand how to blog, and also keep up with present science. This blog was a great journey and I promise to return to this blog for future or present scientific information. I learned a lot from the blog, there are numerous things I loved learning from the blog, one example would be the post of “how is global warming effecting the weather?” by Sam. I learned a lot about Global Warming from researching. This blog was also my favorite post. What I loved about this year would be Dogfish Dissection and the bingo game we played in class of DNA, in which I won three times.

The Dogfish shark dissection was great, and fun because it was my very first dissection ever. Thank you so Ms.Baker for being a great teacher and advisor.    

Biology has been the most exciting science class I have ever been a part of and the blog has just added on to the amount of fun we’ve had in that class! The blog helped me learn about biology related topics that we weren’t learning about in class, and I also got see what my class mates had to say about the same topics. I know find myself more educated on many different topics, ranging from mysterious animals that I had never even heard of before to different diseases that I had never know existed. I think my favorite posts all year round were the ones that the class did about their experiences in London. Everyones was so interesting and I got to learn about all the different exhibits that I didn’t get a chance to see while we were there. My favorite of these posts was the one by Alice, James, and Zach, which was about early monkeys and their roles in evolution. I had already learned about his topic a little bit in school, but it was interesting learning more about it. I will miss biology next year so much!

Miss Baker! I am definitely going to miss biology next year, thanks for being an awesome teacher and I wish you the best of luck at your new job and anything you do in the future . This blog was an incredible thing to be a part of. I watched my classmates gain science fame through the use of nature, and many others get hands on interaction with scientists at science online. I learned that in most cases, the world of science is just a click away, and I learned quite a bit about science in general. My favorite post would definitely be the one about breast cancer, since that’s a problem that’s so close to home. I enjoyed this year so much but the thing I enjoyed most was the dogfish shark lab, one of my first dissections. I also loved experiencing the first subject I actually enjoyed learning about. I love biology!

This year in biology I learned so much! It was such a fun class and I really enjoyed blogging about all of our projects and experiments. I thought the blog was a new and interesting way to reflect on everything we learned in this class and it was such a great system of connecting with outside scientists. I think writing posts and commenting on my classmates blogs were great ways to learn more about them and learn more about my community in general. I learned a lot about topics outside of biology and a lot about subjects relating to modern times and our world today. I loved the posts that explained new discoveries or were from Miss Bakers own personal experience! I really liked posting blogs from our London Trip because that way we all learned a lot about each other, and about the museum we visited. I really like connecting through the internet from an experience we all shared! I really liked the cladogram project towards the end of the year where we all organized animals in a phylogenetic tree. This year was a very great experience!

Biology was always a class i looked forward to everyday. It was a really exciting class in which I learned a lot of things. The blog was really cool and interesting because I was able to learn things about biology that we weren’t discussing in class and enjoyed learning new thing. one of my favorite topics was about the Hela cells because we were able to handle actual cancerous cells and it was my first time using a microscope. I really liked how we incorporated the trip to London with the blog because even after coming back from london, I was able to learn about stuff that i didn’t see in the museum. This year was a great experience. I had a lot of fun. Thank you for being a great teacher and advisor      

I’m so glad that you’re keeping the blog going. It’s such a great way to showcase all of your talented students. It’s also really unique. Not a lot of biology teachers have a site like this. Keep up the good work.

Hello Ms. Baker. My name is Lauren and I am a future educator! I was very intrigued when I came across your blog. Your students seem so fond of you and very excited to learn biology. I hope that my future students will feel the same passion for biology as your students have described above. This blog really has me thinking of creating a blog for my students. Its a great idea to have a connection to students outside of the classroom.  
How did you get your students so interested in biology and excited to learn?

Hi Lauren! I’m glad you’re interested in blogging with your future students. Blogs are an amazing way to get students interested in biology and at the same time teach them important communication & research skills. My biggest tip when blogging with students is to give them a lot of freedom about what they write about. Don’t assign them topics. As long as it is biology-related I let my students blog about anything they find interesting. This leads to greater conversations and higher interest from the students. Because students have different interests, you’ll be surprised at the diversity of topics they will choose and how much of the course content gets discussed on the blog. My second tip is to make your blog public if you can. I moderate all comments and posts before they are published so nothing appears on the blog without me seeing it first. This allows me to make the blog public so that students are able to interact with scientists in the real world. Too many teachers keep their blogs private and they lose out on a lot of possibilities. Talk to your administrators and tell them how you will be keeping the students safe. If you keep your blog private you won’t have to moderate comments so your workload will be easier, but you won’t be able to show off all your students’ work very easily and you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities. Good luck!

Thank you so much for the advise. I will definitely use it in my classroom!