Assignment 3: My thoughts and progress:

This week I started to contemplate the assignment 3 task, probably a bit early but I need to get my automatic mechanism thinking about it now. I am studying to be a science teacher (secondary). I have done a lot of lesson and unit planning in chemistry and decided to concentrate on biology this time. I thought, “where is a good place to start in biology”, having never planned any biology lessons. I came to the conclusion, “after careful consideration” to start at the core of biology and an area that I know well. For those that do not know, one of the core features of biology is the diversity of life, its evolution, and systematics. Students need to get some perspective on the diversity of life as a way to understand life. It is all well and good to teach cell biology and genetics but I think that secondary students “particularly middle phase learners” need perspective, not detail and invisible concepts.
Once I decided to look at the diversity of life I found myself weighing up a number of options:
1: Take a broad brush to the whole of life.
There is a problem here, how does one teach it, use the 5 kingdom system (which is outdated and frankly ridiculous given our current knowledge) or teach the 3 domain system for which two thirds of it are bacterial (rather boring and invisible to middle phase learners).
2: Look at one particular group of organisms.
I decided to go with the 2nd option and look at the plants. Now I have the problem of how to present them. The plants are divided into a number of broad groups including the seedless non-vascular plants (the mosses), the seedless vascular plants (the ferns and fern allies), the gymnosperms (plants with naked seeds including the pines and cycads), and the angiosperms (covered seeds, the flowering plants). These groups are further divided into divisions and it is these divisions that are the break at which I have decided to concentrate on. For example the seedless vascular plants are divided into 4 divisions including the Psilotophyta, Lycopodiophyta, Equisetophyta and Polypodiophyta. I have decided to produce a PowerPoint as a teaching tool. The PowerPoint will divide the plants into their groups (this is a colloquial concept) and then discuss the divisions and their differences. I hope to include in the PowerPoint pictures (full slide pictures) and taxonomic trees (I would make the PowerPoint available to the students). Along with the PowerPoint I hope to set up a blog which the students will add to as a class (giving them administration rights to it).
Importantly as a teacher I can get students actively involved in learning about these plants as they are accessible and rather easily divided based on their characteristics (except for the Equisetophyta).
Secondly to this, I plan on producing a practical PowerPoint that would aim to lead a chemistry class through an experimental procedure and a “teachers notes” to go with the PowerPoint. I am aware that these are two separate lessons though I would like to demonstrate the full use of the ICT. The reason I have chosen to construct a PowerPoint on a different topic is to keep it simple, as I would have to form a dissection and use photographic microscopy to produce a PowerPoint for the plant dissections. I hope this is OK with you Lisa if you are reading this (I will communicate my aims more directly to you in time).